Has anyone found a good way of quantifying hikes? I use efficiency factor to track my progress across rides and runs and it’s incredibly useful. Hikes are a bit tricky though as pace is pretty useless.
Has anyone found a good way of creating an NGP or load for hiking to use as base for EF?
I’ve considered a foot pod but interested to hear any experiences of this.
The reason why I ask is that my daily dog walk is a great indicator of my progress through a health issue. I know if my heart rate is up then a food or supplement choice hasn’t gone well, or my condition has worsened. I walk at a consistent pace but sometimes there are variations (meeting up with people or dog wanting to smell everything) so it’d be great to normalise.
I record my dog walks as Run on my Coros watch. This has the advantage that it records Power (wrist power). Walks on Coros do not record Power, because a too low tempo makes wrist power unreliable. But since I always walk at a pace of ~10m/km +/- 30sec, it does work really well. It’s comparable pace to a lazy jog.
Coros also has something called ‘Effort Pace’ which is sort of GAP, but when you study the traces, you can deduct that Power is also taken in account.
Those 2 metrics, power and effort pace allow a similar efficiency factor.
Now, if you use the Intervals GAP (which is based on Strava’s GAP model), you should have relatively good results if the number of stops is low and the general pace is not too low.
Maybe ‘Equivalent Pace’ that was mentioned recently for rides, could also be a good solution. It’s worth checking out if it works for hikes.