Option to calculate percentages of pace Canova-style

[davidmarttila]

Hello!

I’m now following a plan from the book “Marathon Excellence for Everyone”, which prescribes paces as percentages of 5k and marathon pace. It would be great to be able to define those custom paces and refer to them in the workout builder. This feature request has popped up a few times, e.g. in the threads linked in this comment:

Pace now supported in workouts

These threads also ask the same: Build workouts using paces of fixed distances (eg. 1.2km @ 80% 5k pace) Whether or not to support editing class schedules 5k, 10k, marathon pacing grammar When editing a training session, can you set it by 5k race pace? Specific Pace for Running Plan & Percentage Pace

But something that I haven’t seen discussed much is how those percentages are calculated. The Intervals.icu workout builder currently calculates percentages of speed. “50% 5:00 Pace” will result in 10:00 Pace, i.e. half as fast / twice as slow as 5:00.

In Canova-style workouts with pace percentage prescriptions, the calculation works differently; 50% of 5:00 Pace comes out to 7:30 Pace. This article explains the difference between these two calculations (percentage of speed vs percentage of pace) and provides some motivation for using the latter. The author also has an online tool for calculating pace percentages.

So if setting references paces in the workout builder is in the works anytime soon, it would be awesome if we could also get the option to use the Canova-style method for calculating percentages!

[R2Tom]

This is a one time step to create the custom zone, but you could do it right now and use it in the workout builder

Custom zones for sports

@brainiak005 @claybeans Hey, sorry to necro a dead thread, but I actually set up some custom zones for 5K and Marathon pace based on the Running Writings calc. You have to do some math to get the percentages correct, since as you point out the pace percentages are calculated differently, but I did it. The two zone sets are “Marathon Pace Zones” and “5K Pace Zones”, and they depend on two fields, “Marathon Pace” and “5K Pace”. These are public – if you search for them, you should find them …

The zones from this post are public if I saw it correctly, so you can use this as a starting point

[davidmarttila]

Awesome - this works great, thank you!