What equipment do actually fast distance runners use?

HardLoper wrote:

Bad Wigins wrote:

You can do 20x400 with a 1 lap watch as long as you don't have Alzheimer's.

EXACTLY.

Thank you Bradley. I don't know why some runners are amnesiacs who can't remember their splits.

You typically decide what splits you are going to hit pre-workout, so you're really just using the watch to make sure that you are hitting the predetermined times. So you don't really have to remember every time you ran. You just remember that you were 2 seconds fast on the first rep and 1 second slow on the last rep or whatever.

It might be tough to actually remember your times for 20 400s if your times are completely random, but you don't have to remember 20 individual times. You just need to know your goal pace and remember the (hopefully) few times that you missed that pace.

Bad Wigins wrote:

If you think it's even remotely meaningful for a GPS to tell you your run was precisely 10.1km instead of approximately 10km, then you know nothing of training either and are a hobby jogger.

Good post, Wigins. I do wear a GPS, but I resist the temptation to get worried about running exact round km/mile counts.

Bad Wigins wrote:

800 dude wrote:

You can't do 20x400 with a 30 lap watch, and that's a bread and butter 5k workout.

You can do 20x400 with a 1 lap watch as long as you don't have Alzheimer's.

Indeed.

Needing to know the time to the tenth on every one of 20 intervals seems just as wrong-headed as caring if you ran 10 miles or 9.97.

It seems easy enough to know your average time and progression through a workout without having all 20 precise splits.

Also, that is an early-season workout, right? Few things you do near a race when you'd need/want to know every split are going to involve 30 different splits.

Garmin? wrote:

Bad Wigins wrote:

How many Kenyans do you see cruising around Iten with GPS devices and heart rate monitors? Zero that's how many.

See Canova's post on 9/6/2011 10:39PM.

"We use GPS (Garmin) in every workout on rough road."

So you know more about how Kenyans trains than Renato Canova does? How did you get to know their training? How many of them do you coach?

Do you think that Canova's stable, guys like Mosop and Kirui, are representative examples of Kenyan runners? They're not. This would be like saying most Americans use cryosaunas because you read that Ritzenhein does.

When I was visiting Kenya most of the runners I met had either no watch at all or something very basic. A few guys actually ran with analog watches (i.e. sweep second hands).

I do agree that GPS is extremely useful for marathon training, though, not so much for measuring runs (which you can do other ways) but more for doing long workouts on pace. Maybe some out there can run 12 miles within seconds of their marathon pace without pace feedback, but I need to either be on a course where I know lots of landmarks by distance, or better yet have a handy device telling me the mile splits. I am very sure I'm not alone in this (and glad to be in the company of Moses Mosop)!

Bad Wigins is a turd.