So I'm on the "Run a Race - 5K" plan right now and normally I do heart rate based coaching. But this plan includes several workouts with High Intensity intervals, basically blue zone for 1 minute then immediately to redzone for 25 seconds. Obviously this is not possible with heart rate coaching so I switched to pace based coaching for the run since I ran my assessment with a stride rate sensor on.
I did the run on a treadmill where I could see and set the belt speed. So when I was walking in the blue zone the readout said "3 MPH", and when I was told to go to the red zone I would go up to 6 MPH. At first I tried 6.5 but was told to slow down to the red zone. When I sync'd up and saw the graph on miCoach it said what I thought was 3 MPH was actually closer to 3.3, 3.4 and when I was trying to run at 6 MPH it recorded ~7.4 MPH.
What I have noticed is that at higher speeds the distance recorded by the pacer would go up faster than the treadmill, but it always seemed good at slower speeds. I figured I was just running with a shorter stride than the treadmill intended, so would actually cover the distance slightly quicker.
Is there a way that I can tell if this is an error on the part of my form, my pacer, or the treadmill?
You are pretty much right - on a treadmill peoples stride is generally shorter than when running outside and this is exaggerated at higher speeds.
Neither the treadmill or Stride Sensor will be perfect but in general when running outside with a Stride Sensor straight out of the box it should be 95% correct. It bases its measurements on the gender and height you enter at miCoach.com and uses averages to estimate what you stride length is.
You can callibrate this yourself and make it more accurate to 98%+ by going for a callibrating test run - this is usually best done over a relatively flat surface on a known distance (more than 400m) in free mode.
When you are finished stop, stand still and wait a few seconds and then turn the Pacer off. When you sync the Pacer and the data is taken to your miCoach web account, you can view the results and see if they match with the actual distance.
If it is too short or too long then you can click on the distance and re-enter the actual distance and save it. The next time you synchronise the Pacer will take this data and apply it to your workouts and you should have a more accurate stride length.
If you are going to be using this more often on a treadmill then it is better to do the callibration test run on a treadmill at a speed that is somewhere in the middle of you effort and then do the above process to save the info.
On another point - it is possible to do HR interval workouts - this just means at the beginning your results might not be perfect but they will get better as you become fitter and your heart rate speeds up and slows back down again more quickly between Zones.
Also I'm not sure from your post if you are wearing both the Stride Sensor and HRM during workouts - but just wanted to be clear that you can wear both and collect data from both regardless of what type of training you do. It's only important for Coaching purposes, if you have selected Paced Based training then you will only get Coaching based on the info from the Stride Sensor and HR based training only Coaching based on info from the HRM.
I was wearing both sensors. If I were to calibrate on the treadmill how should I do it? Should I set the incline to 1, like is recommended for the assessment workout or leave it flat so as not to confuse the issue? How long should my stride be when doing this?
I've been running on the treadmill since until the last day or two it's been a bit cold where I live. I'd like to move outside more often as weather improves. If I calibrate on the treadmill how accurate will my distance be outside? If I was going to do both treadmill runs and outdoor runs, would I be better off leaving it as is? Especially given that I normally do heart rate coaching so accurate pace isn't exactly vital?
Reading your post on calibration you indicate that calibrations are only done in free mode. Does that mean that if a run is done in coaching mode and a known fixed distance is ran during this training that distance cannot be used to calibrate?
You can callibrate after any run - I only suggested using free run because you can decide exactly how fast you run and you know the exact distance of the track or route you are running on.
It's just easier to control, but if you are sure of the distance of a coached run then you can use this.
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