Not To Be Trusted With Knives

A graphic look at hill runs

August 11, 2010 by Beth

I’ve mentioned before that I’m using the RunKeeper iPhone app to track my training runs. One of the things I really like about RunKeeper is that it gives you a graph of your pace and the elevation of the runs you do.  And you know I’m a sucker for graphs.

This is a graph from last week’s hill run ((I’d show you the graph of today’s hill run, but the end of it got b0rked, like this one)):

The blue line represents pace, which is in mins per kilometer – that is, how many minutes it takes to run you one kilometre. It’s a little counter intuitive at first, because lower = faster (unlike speed, where higher = faster). Incidentally, I’m not sure why they have “speed” in the legend, since they don’t show speed on the graph ((I think you can select “speed” instead of “pace” as your default measure in settings, but pace makes more sense to me when I am running, so I prefer it)).

The green line represents elevation – it’s easier because higher on the graph = higher in real life.  You can tell the app isn’t perfect though, because on this run I ran up and down *the exact same hill* four times, so the elevation at the 1 km mark, which was the bottom of the hill, should be at the same elevation as the other troughs in the graph ((i.e., just before 2km, ~ 2.5 km, and at the end of the run)).

Also, I’m a little surprised that pace doesn’t mirror elevation – I feel like I run so much faster on the downhill than on the uphill.  It’s starts to show up that way a little near the end, but I would have expected it to be more pronounced.

Also, I think the graph is missing a line.  If I were the one drawing the graph, it would look like this:

Where the red line = will to live.

I hate you hill runs. I hate you long time.

Comments |0|

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.