“Daily Suggested Workouts are workout recommendations made by your watch to provide a level of challenge to help you maintain or improve your current fitness level.”. This is the description of this feature from here https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=oYknGZ910l1pfBNzkDHX6A.
This is week 3 of what I will be doing. As mentioned already in Week 2 post, So far, I seem to get used to do something daily although the rest days are always welcomed! 🙂
Here are the training stats details after two weeks of training. Info taken from Training Status on Garmin Connect page. Under Reports – All activities.
Running VO₂ max: 52, increased from 51 on Tuesday, Apr 25. “VO₂ Max is a good indication of your cardiovascular fitness and should increase as your level of fitness improves.”
“Exercise load measures how much oxygen your body consumes for recovery after an activity. The longer or more intense the activity, the higher the score.”
“Acute training load is a weighted sum of your recent exercise load scores. It’s rated low, optimal or high based on your fitness level and training history.”. The green tunnel seems to be heading up now.
Note that since I changed my watch a little over a week ago, the Acute Training Load graph change its title to 7-Day Training Load and it seems to be missing data for now. Garmin support said I need to wear my watch more time so that this graph starts showing data. Although this seem like a bad excuse, since I can view this data in the Connect app on the phone.
Below is the same screenshot from last week. Current week shows no data in this graph.
| Week 3 | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Planned | Rest | Base 30:00 @5:55 /km | Recovery 24:00 @6:45 /km | Threshold 2×8:00 @4:45 /km | Rest | Base 30:00 @5:55 /km | Trail Running Race 11km |
Regarding the plan itself, below are some screenshots from how Garmin described it. As a note, I have a trail running race on April 30 and June 18. June 18 being the primary race, so the plan is build so that I reach this race with the best possible form.
As you can see, there are several phases to go through: Base, Build, Peak, Taper, and the race day. Depending on when the primary race is, in 1 month, 3 months, 6 months etc, the entire plan will be built accordingly with each phase taking a specific timeframe. This same approach is described as “periodization” in Joe Friel’s book “The Cyclist’s Training Bible“. I can’t recommend enough this book! I’ve read and followed this book several times when preparing for mountain biking cycling races and every single time, I reached my peak performance right when needed and all my races were a Personal Best! I can’t say the same about his “The Mountain Biker’s Training Bible” book though. It just confused me more I guess…
Monday: Rest day.
Tuesday: Base workout.
Wednesday: Recovery run. It costs me a lot to run at 6:45, my legs feel more sore after this run 🙂
Thursday: Threshold run.
Friday: Rest day.
Saturday: Easy, base run. Tomorrow is my trail running race. Will be interesting, since I only trained on asphalt lately. Garmin says 57 minutes as completion time. Well, on asphalt I can believe it; on trail I kind of doubt but will see tomorrow what can squeeze from my legs.
Sunday: Finally, the day with my first race as part of this “Garmin” test is here and has been completed successfully but not easily. First of all, what surprised me the most is the watch showing “no events” in today’s suggested workouts list. I was expected it to say something about the race but no… nothing. Only the morning report showed a screen about it but nothing else as far as I could see.
Now, remember up until yesterday the watch was kind of guessing the race completion time. It dropped from the 1h 5 min about 10 days ago and dropped to 56 once and yesterday showed 56 min and 50+ seconds, so 57 minutes. Guess what, I did 57 min 18 sec! This is my start to end activity time, during which I ran 55 min and walked 2 min.
About the race, overall it was good. I knew the trails like my hand because I lived there for 2 years and ran a lot on those trails, but today’s run was “all-in”. I suffered a lot, I tried to run as much as possible and stopped only one some hills to drop my hear rate a little. But, I did not notice I forgot to run fast on the descents. Could be due to lack of training on the trails, since I trained only on road lately. I think I will start doing more runs on trails, even if my workout execution score will drop a little. I need to be better prepared for running up and down the hills.
