Data, data, data

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I’m a scientist. Call me weird but I love data, graphs, and statistics. That’s why I am giving the Strava subscription a try, as opposed to just the free membership. What I consider a very insightful graph is the one showing overall fitness: simply put, it relates the relative effort to the training load. So, for example, if you suddenly increase your training load and the activities require a lot of effort, your calculated fitness will go down.



 

The fitness plot of my last year perfectly depicts how things went and how they are going now, although I am not sure where the extrapolation (the dashed bit at the end) comes from :P The little orange circles are races: you can see that I ran a few fall races last year, and I was in pretty good shape (actually, the best shape I had ever been in). Then, mid-October, I started having a few health problems which I didn’t manage to shake until April! After Christmas, I had a bit of an up-hill period, but then I was swamped with job interviews in February, plus another rather annoying health hiccup in March. I started working out and running again in April, and the curve reflects exactly how I feel: my endurance and pace are getting better and better, I feel great after runs, and clearly my training plan is working, yay!



 

What probably helps a lot with this is the post-run care I get from the kids: “lasagne” and “lemonade” are great for refueling after today’s 9K run ;)



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