Burnsy wrote:
I use this. It’s essentially a field-based economy measure. I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t been widely disseminated or used, as I find it pretty informative. I don’t use it to guide training, however, but rather as a barometer to check-in on fitness once or twice a week.
Its not very stable to use instantaneously (due to both GPS speed noise and heart rate fluctuations), but good to use over a long segment (several minutes or even kilometers).
One way the b/km could be used in planning the training is to set objectives for certain periods of time.
Let's say that your exercise average is 600 b/km.
For a week you plan to run 100 km.
From this distance you plan to run 10 km at 10% lower b/km, which is 660.
You could achieve this by running 10 km uphill.
I think that this idea is similar to power measure used by cyclists, but the math isn't provided out of the box, as they have it, so could be a reason why runners aren't embracing it.