"[Heather MacLean, an Olympic 1,500-meter runner] realized her watch was draining the fun from her runs. It was especially apparent to her during a low-key stretch when she was simply trying to build fitness.
I hated that every run I went on, I felt like I had to check my pace and my distance and whatever else,” she said. “So I just decided that I was going to lay off it for a while and switch to a regular watch.”
She never went back. MacLean, 28, who now wears an Armitron Dragonfly that she said she picked up for $10 at Walmart, acknowledged that there were certain workouts when a GPS watch would come in handy, like when she did a tempo run by herself. (Tempo runs are faster than easy jogs, and frequently run at a prescribed pace.) But Mark Coogan, her coach, has long prioritized effort over pace, and MacLean logs her training in minutes rather than in miles.
“I know I’m at the elite level now, so not everything is going to be joyful,” MacLean said. “But when there are things that bring me a lot of joy, I’m going to invest in them. And one of those things is the ability to avoid focusing on my pace during my runs.”
Without the pressure of feeling as if she needs to account for every mile — or, perish the thought, post her workouts for public inspection on Strava, the exercise-tracking platform — MacLean has also gotten better about listening to her body. She has no qualms about bailing on an extra workout if she is feeling beat.
“And I’ll tell Mark that I’m going for a walk instead,” MacLean said. “And he’s like, ‘OK!’”
Oh that’s very interesting to hear. I’ve just signed up for TAO yesterday and I’m excited to try it out.
I must say from what I’ve seen of it so far, it has some weird deficiencies, like the inability to tell it I want my Sunday run to be the longest one—or even that I definitely want a Sunday run at all. Guess I’ve just gotta learn to trust the AI’s wisdom? Seems to sorta go against the idea that it’s about flexibly reacting to your life.
Out of interest, do you have any particular fields it’s helpful to display when running a TAO workout?
You can customise the plan. You can’t tell it “Do my long run on Sundays”, but if the reason you want to do it on Sunday is because you don’t have enough time on the other days, you can cap the maximum time it will give you on a per day basis. You can set it as the default to never do long runs during the week, but then over ride it as needed if you know that you’ll be on holidays, or have a day off etc.
Go out and do your long run on Sunday, and it will rebuild the plan around it.
I just leave them as the default. Which basically means that my Garmin shows me the pace band it wants me to stay inside of for most things, except for recovery periods, when it shifts over to HR instead.
The only issue is, the Garmin defaults to only showing my current lap/leg average pace, and doesn’t show my instantaneous pace. If I ever got around to customising that screen, I’d add instantaneous pace and lap/leg pace to both be visible. As it is, I just swap between screens if I really want to see it