Rucking activity and trail running with backpack

[ROBMONTGOMERY]

@isazi Rucking is becoming very popular. It would be nice to track the activity we are doing vs the wrong one.

There are some pretty stupid activity modes included in an adventure watch, and Rucking should absolutely be there if those are haha.

[stby04]

@Egika said in Rucking activity and trail running with backpack:

maybe the discussion is similar to the Ebike discussion.

Question: If I am training with extra load, the HR should be higher than without. The training load depends on the time spent in different HR zones, right?
So actually the training effect should be reproduced just fine without any extra setting?

I’m not familiar with the ebike discussion, but my next question then would be: Which metrics are affected by body weight? After all we do have to insert in the watch, so I assume it is required for some calculations. And is it really body weight that matters, or “moving weight”, like the total weight that I am carrying for a certain activity.

Personally, I would love if we could add weights to single activities. Hiking with backpack (which now seems to be called rucking? I don’t really see the difference to hiking there) is an obvious use case, but so is trail running or cross-country skiing, or really any sport where you move for an extended time and might carry additional and heavy equipment. Personally, I also wonder if weights that you’re not carrying but pushing/pulling (running strollers, sleds, …) might influence certain metrics.

[stromdiddily]

@stby04 said in Rucking activity and trail running with backpack:

@Egika said in Rucking activity and trail running with backpack:

maybe the discussion is similar to the Ebike discussion.

Question: If I am training with extra load, the HR should be higher than without. The training load depends on the time spent in different HR zones, right?
So actually the training effect should be reproduced just fine without any extra setting?

I’m not familiar with the ebike discussion, but my next question then would be: Which metrics are affected by body weight? After all we do have to insert in the watch, so I assume it is required for some calculations. And is it really body weight that matters, or “moving weight”, like the total weight that I am carrying for a certain activity.

Personally, I would love if we could add weights to single activities. Hiking with backpack (which now seems to be called rucking? I don’t really see the difference to hiking there) is an obvious use case, but so is trail running or cross-country skiing, or really any sport where you move for an extended time and might carry additional and heavy equipment. Personally, I also wonder if weights that you’re not carrying but pushing/pulling (running strollers, sleds, …) might influence certain metrics.

I think main difference is rucking is typically an event either for time or duration whereas hiking, not sure there’s a competitive version?

[Adrian.S]

I think the author means something else:

you “weigh more” = you burn more calories = so you have a higher TSS/CTL score and so on = Suunto should convert this into recovery and training load into your statistics.

[gerasimos]

@Adrian.S also more power and effort at duration uphills… more difficult downhills… more duration at the end.
If you have a 15 -20 kg at the back in same route everything it’s much more difficult in the same route.

[maszop]

@Adrian.S @gerasimos The same applies to wind, rain, cold, elevation, difficult ground - I still don’t fully understand why a backpack is some kind of special difficulty that needs to be treated separately, while, for example, marshy ground or headwinds are not.

[dankcushions]

i think it’s probably a bit of an esoteric/impossible task to quantify exactly how rucking affects the various training metrics.

what garmin does is just sandboxes their rucking activity type so that it doesn’t affect these things. eg a rucking activity that sets your heart on fire despite a relatively slow speed won’t affect your global vo2 max ‘score’.

i would suggest that if suunto even get as far as letting users log rucking activities and the weight of the pack, they do as garmin and don’t feed it into your training metrics.

[Adrian.S]

@maszop We are only considering what Suunto can measure here, I suppose.

The additional weight may affect the factors I mentioned: TSS/CTL/etc.

Anyway, I don’t care about that because I don’t engage in such activities. But I see no reason to do something that the competition doesn’t do.

[Fenr1r]

@maszop The difference to all of those (except elevation) is that the rucksack is a predictable, constant, easily measurable factor over the duration of each such activity. And Suunto is already using weight as a factor as @Adrian.S describes.

Elevation has Naismith’s rule or alternatives. No idea how/if Suunto already incorporates similar.

Your other factors are also relevant but extremely inconvenient to measure (bucket, anemometer & pitot beanie?), variable between activities (marshes expand/contract) and/or subjective (“cold”, “difficult”).

[ROBMONTGOMERY]

@Adrian.S Garmin is now starting to roll out rucking as an activity type. If Suunto has “mermaiding” it should certainly have rucking haha. Just a classification as a sport activity. It could be barebones and literally just be an activity type without further consideration. But rucking is different than walking. Rucking is different than hiking (unless you are carrying a weighted pack). I don’t see how a growing sport/activity couldn’t just be added. If you have mermaiding, you need rucking LOL.

[Stavrogin]

@ROBMONTGOMERY I totally agree.

[Brad_Olwin]

@ROBMONTGOMERY Just make a custom sport mode from hiking or trekking and call it rucking…don’t see an issue here. Your hr will increase with more weight so that should be reflected in the CTL/ATL/TSB calculations. There is no need to add extra weight.

[Lazyjones]

@Brad_Olwin So, if weight is irrelevant, why to put any number to the user profile?

[aiv4r]

@Lazyjones weight is most likely used in calories calculations / daily calories, besides that probably not much else.

[Lazyjones]

@aiv4r For me activity is all about energy. I need to know how hard was the training, and energy is just physics: mass, time and distance. Everything else is bonus I can ignore, like HR Of course HR tells something about my athletic changes over the time and about unmeasured factors like wind, ground resistance, etc. but I can live without it easily
On the other hand… sleep tracking is nice and recovery data, but still - neglecting weight we carry during activity is horrible mistake imo.