Suunto ZoneSense
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I never used real time stamina on my watch. I only have seen it afterwards in the stats. I remember a particular long run about 20km. I felt it getting harder at about the 17km mark. That is where Garmin said I only had a stamina of 1 left. But I still could run and get home without being totally exhausted.
Garmin Stamina one of those features that I found to be useless in reality. In a 30+ hour ultra the stamina dropped to nearly zero in 10 hours, and yet I continued to run for another 20 hours. It might work correctly for a typical runner in a short run, but it definitely doesn’t adapt to ultra running. In general, none of Garmin metrics work well for ultra or trail running.
But similarly, Suunto ZoneSense has never worked for me. I stopped paying attention to it.
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I never used real time stamina on my watch. I only have seen it afterwards in the stats. I remember a particular long run about 20km. I felt it getting harder at about the 17km mark. That is where Garmin said I only had a stamina of 1 left. But I still could run and get home without being totally exhausted.
Garmin Stamina one of those features that I found to be useless in reality. In a 30+ hour ultra the stamina dropped to nearly zero in 10 hours, and yet I continued to run for another 20 hours. It might work correctly for a typical runner in a short run, but it definitely doesn’t adapt to ultra running. In general, none of Garmin metrics work well for ultra or trail running.
But similarly, Suunto ZoneSense has never worked for me. I stopped paying attention to it.
Thanks for the report on that. My use would be interval work, things like doing repeating 800m and deciding whether to stop after four iterations or six, etc.
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I wonder if @brad_olwin is still using it or not
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I wonder if @brad_olwin is still using it or not
He is! I primarily use it for the AT boundary and not the LT boundary. I only trust the estimates ZS gives me on Zones if I do a hard workout where I transit across all zones. Tempo workouts provide AT and LT numbers that are close to my test values. I do not change these and have found them stable. I do however use ZS for my easy runs to make sure I absolutely stay in ZS1. For races, I use ZS and try to limit my time is ZS 2. I try very hard not to enter ZS 3 during a race (ultra).
My predicted zones do bounce around especially with easy runs so I tend not to pay attention to the suggested zone boundaries unless I am doing harder workouts but as I said earlier the estimates have been stable for me on the hard workouts, not the easy ones.
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@raven I agree with @sky-runner on Garmin Stamina. An hour or two into a 50k race my stamina is 0 but I was able to go another 4-5h at the same effort and finish the races within 6-7h. When I had a Garmin watch I replicated this several times.
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@raven I agree with @sky-runner on Garmin Stamina. An hour or two into a 50k race my stamina is 0 but I was able to go another 4-5h at the same effort and finish the races within 6-7h. When I had a Garmin watch I replicated this several times.
Yeah, seems long endurance efforts isn’t the strong point. For me that’s fine. I may do one 20km-22km effort a year, and most of the time I’m doing either 5km or 10km overall efforts. When possible, I like to get time on track and do interval work with 100m, 200m, 400m, and 800m targets, and recoveries in between.
This is where ZoneSense might not even register at all for a shorter interval; I might do 200m at 3:30/km, then switch to a walk and see the entire time was “green” as the effort wasn’t long enough. That’s not a slam on ZoneSense; it’s not what it’s meant to do. I’m curious if situations like that might actually register with Garmin’s Stamina or not. Post-session, I can model workouts on intervals.icu and see W’bal effects when I go above my running FTP, but during session there’s no real tool for this I have at the moment. Here’s an example (4x 400m) with Suunto/ZoneSense on left, intervals.icu on right:
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@raven I know it would be nice to have an objective live metric that tells you how high the intensity is and if you should stop at one point or do another interval or not, but so far Sport science hasn’t found that physiological metric and it probably never will because intensity, time to recover etc. depend on so many factors that are not measurable and very individual.
Professionals also mostly report RPE and perceived “freshness” next day to their coaches to control intensities etc. Closest they come to a live intensity measure is lactate measurements and actual race paces. But for that they also need experience from past workouts to predict the intensity and estimate it during the workout. Most of the world class african runners don’t even use GPS watches and heart rate at all. They know from experience what splits they can run and how hard a proper workout should feel like and then they just run.
That’s why you also have never heard of any professional using ZS or Garmin stamina or whatever.
Don’t make it too complicated and waste your energy searching for some perfect metric that doesn’t exist at the moment. Get to learn your body and your strength and be honest to yourself when listening to your body. That’s best we can do… -
@brave_dave 100% nothing beats RPE. I tried ZS few times, while it corelated alright in easy runs, races and harder workouts was a bit of a mess so I gradualy forgot it exist.
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@aiv4r yes, that’s the way to go!
I always ask my athletes and myself, how quick and how many repetitions were run in the last successful intervall session and how the feeling was the days after. That will be the initial target for the beginning, where RPE does not work yet because everything feels easy. Mostly this prediction over pace from past workouts or races is already very close to what one is capable of at the moment and minor adjustments then come over RPE. The feeling for RPE, one learns over time. But as in ever other sport, experience is key. -
@raven agree with you! ZS is not great for the training you are doing.
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