Running inside with a garmin

wileyfish1

Few questions for training inside on a TM with a garmin 310xt and foot pod.

I have tried to calibrate the foot pad to match the pace on the treadmill for intervals...  ufortunately because my cadence is higher at higher speeds it is a little off.  Should I just calibrate it to my zone 4 pace as that is what most of the intervals are??  Since I set up the workout on my watch beforehand should I just do the intervals by time vs distance so that I am running 7:48 min and assume that is a mile??  Or should I just set the intervals for a little longer to ensure that I am going long enough for each interval??

I know it is not a huge issue other than being able to reliably document the actual distance I run for each workout, but was wondering how other people manage this issue...

Thanks Brian

Michele Cellai

Brian-
Disclaimer in that I do not use a TM, Garmin 310XT or foot pod. I run outside, all of the time (except the occasional vacation TM) with a Garmin FR305.

But- I do recall that some folks have found the foot pod to NOT be very accurate.

When I am on a TM, I set the pace and run for the prescribed distance. It is the pace that is critical. You can always break the distance up, i.e. instead of 3 x 1 mile you could do 6 x 0.5 mile, but you still want to try and hit the correct pace. Hope that helps.

William Jenks

I have a footpod, but don't do much treadmill running; I'm fortunate enough to have access to a decent indoor track. I have found that it's pretty accurate as long as you calibrate it for the the same basic kind of running as you calibrate it, e.g., a calibration on the track didn't do well on a treadmill.

Also, if I did a major shoe lace tightening/loosening/whatever, it needed to be recalibrated. I had a pretty good sense of htis, of course, because the track is marked.

Your cadence is also faster on flat ground when you go faster, and i didn't see major problems over a reaonable range of training paces.

That said...I'm quoting track results, not treadmill. And I'm considering 1% to be reasonable error.

Coach Patrick

What michelle said, on a treadmill I just do the math with the display. Then I manually enter in the run workout into WKO (I covered 5.42 miles in 37:00, etc., and that does the rTSS, etc).

Scott Alexander

Posted By Patrick McCrann on 18 Oct 2010 06:09 AM

What michelle said, on a treadmill I just do the math with the display. Then I manually enter in the run workout into WKO (I covered 5.42 miles in 37:00, etc., and that does the rTSS, etc).

Unfortunately, with WKO, you can't record all the intervals, etc, unless you do a manual workout for each and every section. I wish they'd change that.

I bought a footpod for my 305 a few years back, and still have never even used it.



 

mkmiec

I use a treadmill and a Garmin Forerunner 305 & footpad for some of my interval runs.  I found that calibrating it to my Zone 4 pace to be very helpful/more accurate than calibrating it at a slower speed.   For example, for the half mile calibration, I run the first 0.10 miles at a Zone 1 pace, then the rest at my Zone 4 pace (currently 7:20ish).   Then when I run, my interval will be at 7:20 min/mile and the footpad will say 7:16-24, and then my rest portion I will jog at 10:30 and the footpad will typically say 10:45 - 11:15.  I am ok with that data, since it gets me accurate results on the interval/work portion 

Tom Glynn

I too use the Garmin 305 with footpad on a treadmill. Treadmills are not necessarily accurate and will have a built in margin of error also. I'll set pace info from the treadmill, but record the Garmin/footpad data and load it into WKO.   It's close enough and I much prefer the data from the footpad than a manual entry into WKO. You'll get a much better PMC graph if you try and avoid manual entries, which simply averages all the data.

mgraffeo

Agree completely with Tom. I calibrated on a track at around my Z4 pace, did it two times, took the average coefficient from the two reps, and haven't touched it since.

At the same time, I took the calculation for checking your treadmill speed(in an old post somewhere) and confirmed that my treadmill's seed was pretty close to reality. Nowadays, the footpod and treadmill agree pretty closely (slightly off at z1, but not enough to bother me). Works great for wko downloads to avoid the averaging effect.

Unlike William, i've never had a problem switching the pod between shoes, much less with tightening my laces. It's been rock solid. William, do you have the older, longer one, or the newer round one?

Mike

gilliatt

FWIW, I bought a footpod for my 305 last year the longer one. I tried several times to get the thing calibrated but could never really get it dialed in to where it was anywhere near consistent. I waded into my pond in an old pair of shoes that it was still on from last OS and think I fried the thing. I'm going back to entering it manually into WKO.