I have been doing a lot of track workouts on my own lately and it has been hard to hit the intended pace...
Imagine a small electric autonomous type RC Car that drives a few feet infront of you at a given workout pace. So if you want to hit 70s each lap this little guy will make sure to bring you through right on pace. Instead of looking at your watch every 15secs, you only have to worry about sticking with the device.
Thoughts? Would you use it?
yeah ive thought about like having a light on an indoor track and following that would be cool, for workouts yeah thatd be cool, but for time trialing too, like you would know exactly what pace you need to go to say break 10 or something.
Yes, would use it. The problem would be that it will crash into all of the people walking in lanes 1 and 2 when I'm trying to do my workout.
That would be awesome. I saw something exactly like that in development a while back but I haven't heard anything about it lately
Emaciated Hobby Jogger wrote:
Yes, would use it. The problem would be that it will crash into all of the people walking in lanes 1 and 2 when I'm trying to do my workout.
+1000
ideaman2016 wrote:
I have been doing a lot of track workouts on my own lately and it has been hard to hit the intended pace...
Imagine a small electric autonomous type RC Car that drives a few feet infront of you at a given workout pace. So if you want to hit 70s each lap this little guy will make sure to bring you through right on pace. Instead of looking at your watch every 15secs, you only have to worry about sticking with the device.
Thoughts? Would you use it?
This is a great concept, but wouldn't someone have to drive the RC car?
Ideally, you'd want something inexpensive and easily portable that could be operated by one person.
How about a metronome set at exactly one second and 70 cones set at equal distances around the track?
When I have athletes who are not good at pacing themselves I sometimes give them a track session and get them to use the interval facility of their Garmin. You need to use time as opposed to distance covered.
Just set the interval facility for each 100m segment. So if you are running 1600s at 72 pace: length of interval will be 18 seconds, length of recovery 18 seconds number of reps 8. The watch will do a countdown beep and you hit the relevant 100 mark on the track at the final beep. If you want 70s just change recovery to 17 instead of 18 and remember when the 1st/3rd/5th and 7th beep occurs your checkmark will be about 3m after the relevant 100m mark i.e. 400 x 18/70 = 102.9m. The even checkmarks at 200/400/600 etc. should correspond to the beep.
It is great for pace judgment without looking at your watch, as long as you can endure the constant beeping.
absolutely would use, derval made good points also.
This is a fairly easy thing to make believe it or not. There is a white line around the entire track right? There are already autonomous vehicles that travel following a line.
https://diyhacking.com/make-line-follower-robot/
Yes, this is a very crude moving toy. But you get the idea. The groundwork of the line is at every track. Now you just have to clean up the ability of the car to sense the line and make sure it goes like hell with enough battery to last 5mi of driving.
You could have the car drive on the second lane line (because some tracks have rails), program it to move slightly faster than the pace you want to compensate for longer than 400m.
If I remember correctly they have lights around the track of Papendal in the Netherlands that you can program to light up at a certain pace.