Incorrect pace zones for workouts

[William_Barnes]

Hi David,

I’ve been playing around with pace zones and specifying workouts using pace zones. I’m not the greatest runner and there’s quite a difference between my sprint pace and my threshold pace and the preset zones don’t really fit me; as such I’ve set some custom zones.

Generally this works excellently, but have noticed that specifying workouts using Z6/7 get capped at a pace of 130% threshold pace, when I have specified Z6/7 higher than that.

Not sure if a bug or something intentionally designed in, but if the cap could be removed that would be excellent.

Thanks!

[david]

I need to have some cap for the top zone to find the middle of it for the charts and so on. What would be a reasonable % of threshold pace?

[William_Barnes]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Simplest way could be just to let the user specify the top of their pace Z7 or sprint pace in the /settings.

Or could look at the size (range) of Z6 and assume Z7 is the same size.

Or if you implement the saved best pace vs distance I’ve seen discussed in other threads, could make sure Z7 top is at least as fast as best pace for the shortest distance saved.

I could suggest a hard min/mile (or min/km) pace, but that might work for no-one other than me!

[Andrii_Magalich]

Ursain Bolt’s maximum sprint speed is 45km/h. This is certainly more than 200% of his threshold pace

[david]

Maybe you could use the percentage pace ranges for Z7 work? Example:

- 1m 120-160% Pace

I tried bumping the top to 200% but this creates a huge range of outputs (not useful IMO) and squashes anything else flat on the chart:

[William_Barnes]

Yes you are right I definitely can achieve what I want reverting to % of threshold pace - indeed this is what I have done for many power based workouts created before you introduced the ability to define workouts based on zones.

For me the key advantage of the zones feature is to be able to easily prescribe workouts knowing that I’ve set my zones correctly, without having to remember the percentage values. The nice looking graphs are secondary to be honest, and I think for a sprint workout you will have some quite slow paces included (likely walking!) so would expect to see paces at both the top and bottom of the graph. See pic of the workout I created that drew my attention to this due to the very small zone range - to me the relative size of the (pace) bars in the chart looks as I would expect, as does one based on using full Z6-Z7 range from % of threshold pace (also included for comparison)

.

[david]

So do you think using 200% as the upper bound will be ok as is better? If so I will change it.

[William_Barnes]

I think too high would be better than too low, so yes I’d be happy with 200% upper limit for a quick fix. Thanks!

[david]

Done. Hopefully that sorts this out.