Silence of Mind...

[wakarimasen]

The ‘body as machine’ thing has been a revelation to me over the last few years. I regularly slept very little, ate sporadically and drank too much (on occasion). When you take a step back and think of the body as a machine, it’s pretty obvious.

[dulko79]

It is the life style that pushes us so we do not have time for anything. Flooded with stress and information we miss so many things in life, like in relationships, in health…we are focused on unimportant bizzarre things. Not a lot of people listen and stop madness until something breaks…sometimes is too late.

[cosme.costa]

I do not know about you, but everyday that passes I think I need less metrics and features.

Everybody has his history, as a child I was very active, but in my late teens and uni time I was very inactive (with all its consequences), then I started doing quite a lot of MTB until I have two boys and I stopped again, when the younger started to let us sleep I started again with the MTB and running, this was 4 years ago. I bought, then, my first chest strap and GPS device and it helped me, as @ChrisA says, to keep me active and not giving up, because I could see the progress. But nowadays that I listen to my body I think that I could pass without half of the things that the devices offer. For me the problem is the people that are more obsessed with the metrics and features than in enjoying the run/swim/ride… The other day, I even enjoyed doing some hard intervals
The more you know yourself, the less you need, but the thing is that we want all even we are not going to use it.

[cosme.costa]

@dulko79 said in Silence of Mind...:

It is the life style that pushes us so we do not have time for anything. Flooded with stress and information we miss so many things in life, like in relationships, in health…we are focused on unimportant bizzarre things. Not a lot of people listen and stop madness until something breaks…sometimes is too late.

I completely agree with you!

[isazi]

@cosmecosta this is why I want my watch to help me during the activity, and give me some measurements that I can use, and not suggest me what to do or tell me that I am not training properly

[cosme.costa]

@isazi Agreed!

But here, IMHO, users need to be educated and sport watch producers need to educate how the metrics work. As an example, today I did a trail run where I did my best or second best time ever in that route, and I’m feeling that I’m improving but the new TP metrics are saying that I’m losing fitness, and my VO2max has gone also down. I know that all this metrics are based on HR and HR thresholds and I know how to trick VO2max to go up, and I know why it went down. I’m going to get obsessed because the watch and SA say something that I know is not true, NO but other people yes and this is also not good.

[Łukasz Szmigiel]

@cosmecosta even if you know how it works it’s sometimes hard to do. The pressure of numbers is real I’ve managed to keep myself under 145 HR when the temps went up only because I’ve switched pace off my watch face. I know that my pace is irrelevant but I can see how slow I am and its bugging me. Can’t see it, it’s not there, I don’t think about it, I focus on breathing, gait, etc and HR goes down.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

At my peak performance (climbing some pods) I did not have HRM. Yes I did track , but no HRM.

I still miss those times.

Here is a fun fact. At one of those trainings back in 2015 I had worn an HRM from a friend.

I went back to look at the values, it was something like avgHR 190 (not even sure if that is correct), something that today would explode me. Or do I think it would?

[A Former User]

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos back in 2019 on one of the 10K races my average heart rate was 191 bpm, maxing out at finish line at 206 bpm. Not sure if HR data was correct or not, but it was mind blowing looking back at data the next day. It didn’t felt like that hard effort.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@andrasveres that is also race HR. At a race typically the hr is +10-20bpm up, but feels ok.

Adrenaline?

But yeah, many “elite/proff” athletes do not even use HR

[A Former User]

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos indeed, we get some invisible boost on race days
I noticed on my training that when I start to struggle I just stop looking at metrics and start focusing on finding the right mindset for comeback. I keep my watch to display only distance, time and average pace during many of my races and keep it as simple as possible on trainings too (focused on the type of training I do). Too much data can be overwhelming and keeping away my focus from what is important at that moment.

[isazi]

@andrasveres I don’t look at time and distance on a long race, cause I don’t want to think about the future. I usually have only one screen focused on pace and a single lap, so I only focus about executing my plan in the present

[cosme.costa]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos @andrasveres You know which is the most important metric for me? Time of the day, to make sure that on week days I arrive at home before kids wake up and on weekends before my wife is angry

Jokes aside, we also should know that every individual is different. I usually run with a friend that his avgHR is 20 bpm less than mine for the same pace and route. At the beginning I thought his chest strap was faulty, but now we are using the same model and same watch. The other day we did some hard intervals, if you see his graph you can see perfectly all the intervals but mine was lets say, flattish. Of course he is more fitted to me.

[Bulkan]

I really like the @ChrisA post. Agree 100%. I began a path of less is more a few years ago after my surgeries. When you learn that body has a time to health, mind has another timing to health and you have to go brick by brick, adjusting, learning about your body and a process, slow process…

Since then I use aerobic threshold (not anaerobic) to keep my workouts easy even when I’ve been asked if I’m injured because I ride or run very slow. In our society the healthy approach is gone. I prefer to get a faster time in a route with low heart rate rather than go all out and get a Pb. Sometimes a race, or nowadays a faster time in a route I like to do once a month.

The metrics can be useful or a great disturbance in the day.

I have almost all my notifications off, I prefer to run at 5;00a.m with the silence rather than 13;00 with the noise of the city… I train most of my time alone and I need that part of life. So this approach of silence is very intriguing for me.

[A Former User]

@isazi GPS reception can be wobbly sometimes and that affects pace too. Usually I have a target finish time or an average pace set for myself, thats why I use this combonation for my race display. That might change in the future, as I evolve. Right now I’m on the very beginning of my road.

@cosmecosta sure, HR is very individual, but it was ‘high’ compared to my previous runs. I didn’t intend to compare with anyone else’s HR.

[A Former User]

@bulkan

[dulko79]

@cosmecosta but your jokes are not far from reality especially the 2nd one

[Nigel Taylor 0]

@jamie-bg said in Silence of Mind...:

@nigel-taylor-0
i think that part of it is to do with our current situation - in that lots of people are working from home where the distractions are fewer and or very different. You don’t have to get up from you desk to attend meetings, you probably don’t have a variable lift desk, I doubt your chair is as ergonomically comfortable, and you don’t have people coming up disrupting your workflow (instead they PM now), so yes I think we tend to forget to get up, change position, take a breather, like a disruption at work would encourage us to do, and due to this these apps become more popular.

As it happens I’ve worked from home since 1999 as part of a change in working practices in preparation for the then upcoming “Millennium Bug” (which had zero impact on my customers but I did collect a big £££ for working through midnight on 31st Dec 1999!) - and through multiple role and account changes have never had to go back in other than a meeting every couple of months, so I’m well adapted by now!!

But yes, I get this point that there is probably a new focus on “being reminded to look after the self”.

[Nigel Taylor 0]

@chrisa said in Silence of Mind...:

I spent years with masters from asia (and other parts of the world) practicing meditation and breathing. As a typical ‘western guy’ I had not the faintest idea how deep you can get into that topic and how superficial my knowledge about breathing as a whole was. When modern trackers measure HRV metrics they can visualize the ratio of parasympathetic and symphatic activity, but in Asia this concept is known for thousands of years in the form of “yin and yang”. When you are stressed or working out your body gets “yang” and if you keep going like that, your whole system will get “too yang” which will lead to physical and psychological problems. Almost everyone in our modern, western society is too yang nowadays. Meditation and mindful breathing, bringing awareness into your body are “yin” practices and help to balance those yang lifestyle. So if people use trackers or watches to get started to become more “yin” and get back into balance, this is a first step and IMO the right way to do. Sadly, most people are not even aware of being completely out of balance, thinking that going further or working out harder will make them stronger but everything in nature that does not stay in balance will eventually perish.

I think the ‘Resources’ metric is proving insightful to me on this topic, and has even more colour now you’ve mentioned yin & yang.

I don’t typically adjust my behaviours based on data such as ‘recovery hours’ or ‘resources’, but I do like to look retrospectively at data after the fact, to “Quantify My Self” (to half steal someones platform name!) and reflect that there is quantifiable data that reflects my perception of where I’m at and that I continue to “understand myself”…that my Watch gives me a low resources score and tells me I had low quality sleep pretty much every night is a reminder and reflection of what I know - that I typically drink too much alcohol and eat too late to be ‘the best runner I could be’. (this is fine, I don’t want to be the best runner I could be all the time, as I like eating food that is bad for me and I like drinking wine and beer!).

It will be interesting when marathon schedules kick in in June, that comes along with gradually reducing alcohol, eating better and sleeping earlier (without really thinking about any of them, they’re just an outcome driven by increasing running miles) - when I would expect to see my resources closer to 100% most days, and my yin and yang more balanced!!

[ChrisA]

@nigel-taylor-0 I was really amazed when I first heard of things like Garmins Bodybattery or Suuntos Resources and realised that those were some kind of “scientific” metric showing you how good you recovery is. I actually knew about the importance of keeping balance and practiced this for years but I never knew that you can measure it. Being into martial arts for decades I was never aware of all those sports tracking and metrics you will get from Polars, Suuntos, Garmins etc. until I started running last Spring when practicing martial arts was no longer possible (at least with partners). I really appreciate now having the possibility to monitor my resources and see what influences them and I was really shocked how strong the effects of even only two beers before bedtime were on me and how practicing “inner martial arts” like Qi Gong or Tai Chi actually raised my resources when I did them right and managed letting my thinking rest for some time. Hence I fully agree with @cosmecosta and @Bulkan: In the end it’s just You being fully aware what you do. Running in the “silence” or cycling or climbing up a mountain, feeling the aliveness comes first and it’s awesome 🤩 (before your mind kicks in again and your ego asks how fast you did it this time )