Create custom workout using strides

Phew. Given one really only has time or distance to work with, I would try and estimate what pace each would be at  (to set the range) and then (as you say) either estimate the distance or time related thereto.  I suppose one could do a test couple of reps and use that as the base to develop it from.

As a matter of interest, what are you training for? seems an interesting session.

Thanks SMR

That's the workaround ive adopted for now.

Training is my physio's plan.  Week 7 in a 12 week post knee arthroscopy with 25k trail event upcoming in October.

Basic regime currently is:

D1 Strength workout

D2 Fartleks 5k up to 7k

D3 Swim or cycle

D4 Intervals 5k up to 7k

D5 Strength workout

D6 Rest

D7 Long run

Oh wow. Good luck with the recovery and the trail race!

What I would do is set the duration for each of the stride steps to "Lap Button Press" (so they're open-ended), and add a note to each step which describes what you need to do (e.g. "80 strides slow/fast/faster").

The note will be displayed at the beginning of each step, and there will also be separate data page which shows the note during each step.

If you really want to your watch to automatically limit the length of each step, I would try to estimate the time from your cadence, not your speed, since the workout target is literally number of strides (steps), and cadence measures how many steps you take per minute.

For example, let's say your cadence looks like this:

- Slow strides: 180 spm (steps per minute)

- Fast strides: 190 spm

- Faster strides: 200 spm

You can calculate the expected time for each step by inverting your cadence and multiplying by 80 (the desired number of strides / steps):

- Slow strides: 60 seconds / 180 steps * 80 steps = 26.6666 = 27 seconds (approximately)

- Fast strides: 60 seconds / 190 steps * 80 steps = 25.2631 = 25 seconds (approximately)

- Faster strides: 60 seconds / 200 spm * 80 steps = 24 seconds

(Here I'm assuming that 1 stride = 1 step. If 1 stride = 2 steps, then multiply by 160 instead of 80.)

However, given that you're probably not going to run at an exact cadence, and given that there's barely any difference between the time targets as calculated in the example above, I think it makes a lot more sense to take the first approach with open-ended steps and notes for each step. That way, you can just count the strides yourself.

Setting distance targets is also an option, but given that the distances are so short, I think you'll run into similar problems as time-based targets, plus you'll also have to estimate your speed/pace for each target.

EDIT: I guess the fact that you have to repeat all of this for 5k makes my suggestion a lot less practical. Unless your steps are distance-based, there's no way to have the watch automatically limit the whole thing for 5k.

Maybe you could just have one 5k step and track the fartleks yourself, but clearly that's not what you're looking for.

I guess you could try to estimate the average pace of your fartleks, then use that to estimate the total number of sets.

For this example I'll assume the average pace will be 5:00/k, and I'll use the time-based estimate from above.

5:00/k for 5k = 25 minutes = 1500 seconds

1500 seconds / (27 + 25 + 24) ~= 19.74

So your workout could look like this

- 1k warmup

- 20 reps of

- 27 seconds (slow strides)

- 25 seconds (fast strides)

- 24 seconds (faster strides)

- 1k cooldown

So there's two problems here:

- what if you cover the 5k distance quicker than the workout predicts? Then you can either press the lap button until you hit cooldown, or use the activity menu to end the workout (the activity will keep going)

- what if you don't cover the 5k distance in time? To handle this case you could increase the number of reps (e.g. to 22-25), to give yourself some leeway. When you hit 5k, then use the activity menu to end the workout

Either way you'd still have to track the 5k yourself (by looking at the total activity distance.)

Anyway, sorry for the super long blog post which isn't really helpful.