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Why Use a Power Meter for Running?
7
to improve every aspect of your running career. No longer will you wonder
whether you are meeting the intensity, recovery, pace, and volume goals of
your training plan. Instead, you will erase any doubts about your training, and
you will be able to monitor changes and improvements in every aspect of your
running fitness.
Why Power?
If you’re a triathlete, a bicycle racer, or a fan of either pro sport, you are proba-
bly already familiar with the use of power meters in cycling. The power meter
transformed training and racing in the cycling world. It has surpassed every
other training tool because it delivers an objective and repeatable assessment
of overall fitness without any of the drawbacks of previous measurement
methods, such as heart rate, speed, and perceived exertion. In fact, the advan-
tages of the cycling power meter are so great—and the margin of error so
small in the world of competitive cycling and triathlon—that to ignore the
information and the advantage from a power meter would be to concede vic-
tory before the race had started.
In the running world, we have recently seen a surge in the popularity of
GPS units, and we’ve seen these units get smaller and smaller as usage has
grown. The increased adoption of GPS shows that the running world, like the
cycling world, is open to embracing technology and its benefits.
While the GPS unit is a useful tool, its contribution to training pales in
comparison with the advantages the power meter can provide. The leap in
technology is something like the difference between using a typewriter and
a computer. In the history of running technology, a stopwatch is probably
equivalent to using a typewriter—pretty good at its job, but severely limited
in scope. Running’s step up to heart rate monitors was a revelation, but in ret-
rospect, it was like moving from the typewriter to what we would now regard
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29
8
Run with Power
as an old, heavy, slow desktop computer. Today’s GPS wrist units are like the
first cellphones, much like a flip-phone. The portable power meter for running
is the next step, equivalent to the laptop, tablet, and smartphone coming into
existence all at once. And while you can still accomplish a lot with a desktop
computer, you likely will be much more effective in many ways if you add the
laptop, tablet, and smartphone to your arsenal. This is what the power meter
brings to the world of training and racing for competitive running.
I am sure you are wondering what makes this technology so great. Here are
just some of the ways a power meter for running can positively affect training
and performance:
SPECIFICITY
One of the core principles in sports training is the principle of specificity.
Simply stated, in order to become better at a specific task, you must practice
or train that task. For example, doing cross-country skiing in the off-season
can certainly help your running, but you could never expect to become a
great runner by doing only cross-country skiing. The reverse is also true, of
course: You can’t expect to be a great cross-country skier by simply doing run
training all the time.
Power meters help us see how well our specific training is improving our
fitness. More to the point, the power meter can help you prepare for the spe-
cific demands of the target race you’re preparing for. If you want to prepare for
a hilly course, or a race that requires a lot of spikes in pacing (and thus in your
power outputs), you can use your power meter to prepare for that, measuring
with great precision the improvement in your surges or hill climbs.
Once you know what you’re preparing for, your power meter can help
you to better plan and strategize for the event to maximize your performance
potential on the day.
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29
Why Use a Power Meter for Running?
9
TECHNICAL IMPROVEMENTS
Imagine making a small change in your run form and seeing a major change
in power (whether good or bad). The power meter can help you understand
which aspects of your running technique you need to focus on and which
you can improve or even abandon. This understanding becomes especially
helpful when learning or trying a new technical change. It also is a huge
asset late in a race, when you may be tired and need help to stay focused
on going as fast as you can. The power meter can help with that simply by
monitoring your pace and power and telling you accurately what you have
left in reserve.
OBJECTIVE FITNESS MEASUREMENTS
Fitness may seem pretty simple to measure: Just look at how fast you ran. But
not all courses are the same, and conditions vary constantly. What if you ran
entirely into a headwind? Or had a constant tailwind? Yes, pace is a good tool
for analyzing your training, but power and pace together are an even more
powerful way to measure training and fitness. Add in heart rate (HR) and
you’ve got some very objective data to work with.
What these variables can tell you about your fitness includes when you’re
about to hit a performance plateau and need to consider a change in your train-
ing. If you can avoid a plateau in your fitness while continuing to get better and
better, your confidence will grow. Of course, your performances are likely to get
better too, putting you in a better position to achieve your running goals.
If you get injured, you can use these measurements to understand exactly
how much fitness you’ve lost, or better yet, bolster your confidence by showing
you how little fitness you have actually lost. In some cases, the data from your
power meter can even tell you if you are still suffering from an injury that you
thought you had put behind you (or, more likely, that you are pretending to
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27
10
Run with Power
ignore), thus avoiding the chance of further breakdown. Once you measure
fitness with power, you have a new perspective on your running technique
that you never had before.
QUANTIFICATION OF TRAINING STRESS
With power data, we not only get objective fitness measurements, but based on
the intensity of a workout, we can also better assess the actual load of train-
ing stress and fatigue that athletes are under relative to their fitness level at
that moment. In Chapter 8, we’ll define Training Stress Score, or TSS; it’s a
key calculation to quantify the load you’re under as a runner, and it can help
you make sure that your training accomplishes the right amount of stress and
recovery. It is another area where power data is a better predictor of fatigue
and training stress than pace.
BETTER RECOVERY
If you don’t recover adequately, you’re not actually training; you’re just beating
yourself down. You are probably familiar with the formula Training = Stress
+ Rest. But how much stress is enough? How much is too much? How often do
you need to take a day off? How many days of recovery do you need after a big
training block?
The ability to recover from intense training is an extremely individual
trait. If you’re taking a day off simply because everyone else in your train-
ing group is, or if you are guessing when and how much recovery you need,
you might be missing a chance to improve. On the other hand, if you under-
stand the correct amount of recovery you need based on the data from your
power meter, your training will be better. And with better training comes
better performance.
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27
Why Use a Power Meter for Running?
11
PRECISION TAPERING
Tapers and their effectiveness can vary greatly among athletes. Some athletes
feel that they shouldn’t taper at all, some are trying to figure out how long to
taper, and others are just trying to find out what type of taper to do. When you
have data from your power meter that measures training stress and fatigue,
you can use it to better plan and perfect your taper, down to specific target
numbers. When you can taper with precision, you’ll know you are ready when
you toe the start line.
EFFECTIVE WARM-UPS
Few successful runners start a race without a warm-up, but the scope of that
exercise varies considerably. There’s no use expending more energy before
a race than absolutely necessary. With the data from your power meter, we
can dial in specific intensities and certain physiological systems to deliver a
high-quality warm-up that will prepare you fully for your race.
POWER-TO-WEIGHT RATIOS
With the advent of the power meter in cycling, a key measurement for perfor-
mance and potential has become a calculation of the rider’s power divided
by his or her mass. The calculation is expressed as watts per kilogram (w/
kg), and once a certain threshold is reached, we know that athlete is capa-
ble of some amazing performances. Power meters for running give us the
tools to deliver the same calculation. Your ability to convert your watts into
speed can be greatly affected by your mass, as we will discuss in Chapter
5. If you’re looking to break 3 hours for the marathon, reaching a certain
power-to-weight ratio might be a very effective metric on which to base your
training and diet.
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Run with Power
SPEED PER WATT
Possibly the most important concept in this book, and arguably the biggest
advantage of a power meter, is a better understanding of how the watts you
produce are converted into speed. This insight into your running is something
you could never measure until now.
OBJECTIVE FEEDBACK ON PERIODIZATION
At the end of your season, the data you’ve accumulated from your power meter
can be invaluable in assessing how well your training plan worked and how to
move forward with your run training. How did your training go for the year?
Was there a particular type of training you responded to especially well? Train-
ing you didn’t respond well to? Was there a point where things started to go
backward and your performance declined? Being able to see this lets you learn
a lot about yourself as an athlete, and your power meter data gives you an
unparalleled view of your season’s ups and downs.
PACING
A strong fitness base gives you a margin of error to race with, even when it
comes to your pacing. If you make a mistake in pacing, you can minimize
the damage—if you’re fit enough. But add in tough competition, challenging
courses, and rough conditions, and you might not be able to overcome that
pacing mistake. This makes pacing a critical skill for success, especially as you
set your goals higher.
A power meter can help you establish and maintain the correct pace, even
on courses where establishing the right rhythm is difficult. For example, if
you’re preparing for a hilly course that requires perfect pacing, your power
meter can help you dial in the exact output pace you need to hold throughout
the varying terrain.
31
Why Use a Power Meter for Running?
13
Here’s another way a power meter can help with pacing: Many runners
look at pace as a governor; it’s their tool for holding back during a race to make
sure they don’t overdo it in the early going, or get carried away midrace as the
field sorts out. But sometimes with a taper, an athlete might be rested enough
to run even faster than he or she expected; in this case, holding back to a prede-
termined pace might prevent the runner from doing as well as he or she could.
A power meter gives you an objective assessment of your running condition
and can help you determine—even in the middle of a race—when you have the
form to open the throttle.
Training with Heart Rate
and
Power
If you already use a heart rate monitor in your training and racing, you
might be wondering why you need a power meter. The main reason is that
heart rate always lags behind effort. While power is a precise view of your
immediate condition and always represents the work you are doing at the
moment you are doing it, heart rate is like looking in the rear-view mirror: It
tells you what has already happened. If you suddenly up your pace and move
into a sprint, for example, your heart will need a few moments to respond
to your muscles’ request for more oxygen (in the form of increased blood
flow). While your power output has increased, and the amount of work you
are doing is greater, your heart rate is still ticking along at its previous beat.
The same holds true when you back off from a rapid pace: Your speed and
power output decrease, but your heart keeps thumping along until your body
rebalances its systems.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of value in HR data from a work-
out or race. It’s just that to make heart rate a truly valuable tool for analysis,
it needs to be compared with other performance metrics. When we take HR
data and compare it with an actual performance output, like pace and power,
29
14
Run with Power
that changes the game. Now we can begin to measure economy and efficiency,
two essential training concepts that will greatly improve your training. Briefly,
economy is a measure of oxygen usage—how many meters of distance you are
getting from each milliliter of oxygen. Efficiency is a measure of how much
speed you are getting for the watts you are producing. All of this will be cov-
ered in later chapters; for now, the message is that if you already use heart rate,
a power meter will greatly enhance what you get out of it.
Training with Power Versus Training by Feel
There is a misconception I have found among many cyclists and triathletes
(and I am sure it will be true of some runners, too) that using a power meter
and analyzing its data somehow means they can’t train according to feel, or
that they must train and race only by the numbers on the power meter. I am
not sure where this misconception comes from; it might arise from people
assuming that the power meter does all the thinking and does not allow any
deviation. But the power meter doesn’t think, and it isn’t designed to stifle
innovation in training. Quite the contrary; the power meter is designed to help
stimulate innovation in training.
The best coaches and athletes are the ones who innovate, who devise train-
ing sessions and periodization plans that meet the individual needs, strengths,
and weaknesses of the athlete on a regular, daily basis. Sometimes athletes feel
good and are able to push the pace, and sometimes not, even if they’re doing
the same thing they did the day before.
The ability to read the signs of fatigue, to listen to the body to squeeze out
every possible ounce of training, is something that requires careful observa-
tion by both the coach and runner in order to maximize performance poten-
tial. A power meter supports this because it’s not about pace (time, distance,
cadence); it’s about power and the work actually accomplished.
27
Why Use a Power Meter for Running?
15
If you coach yourself, one of the biggest challenges you face is not having
an objective expert at your side who can remove all emotion from the deci-
sion making. The power meter can help fill that role, giving you factual data so
that you can evaluate your training and make smart decisions for your future
training sessions.
To be sure, nothing in the world is perfect, and that includes the running
power meter. Some power meters can account for wind, while some can’t.
Some can account for the type of shoes you use or the terrain you run on, but
others can’t.
A power meter also cannot tell you how your legs feel, or where your mind
is at. It can’t tell you when to make a move in a race. But a power meter can
help you learn your own strengths and weaknesses, and it can supplement
your gut feelings and ability to read your body. It can tell you when you can
increase your efforts and when you need to hold back, and it can help tell you
how hard to push, both in training and during a race. As much as anything, the
power meter can make you faster and fitter than ever before.
This book will give you a great understanding of the current state of power
meter technology and how we can use it. It’s the first book of its kind, and I will
be the first to admit that there is plenty more to learn about power meters in
the years ahead. But I am confident that the power meter can help you improve
your training and fitness right now, starting today. I am also convinced that
this book has the right information to get you started so that you can use your
power meter effectively. In the following chapters, we’ll define the concept of
power, then explore the many ways to use power measurements in your daily
training and racing. So let’s get going on the path to better running.
Documents you may be interested
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