Not dismayed by current social isolation rules, a passionate group of keen runners are staying connected as they stay apart by taking part in a ‘Virtual Race Club’ organised by the Mornington Peninsula Athletic Club.
 
Despite regular inter-club competition organised by Athletics Victoria being postponed due to the coronavirus shutdown, the club has taken competition into their own hands, producing a race series where participants run a set distance and upload their performances online via social-fitness network, Strava.
 
Taking advantage of Victoria’s consideration that solo outdoor exercise is considered an essential activity, the race series remains one of the only organised local sporting competitions still running during the lockdown.
 
More than 70 runners recorded entries the first week-long event, the “MPAC Corona 5km”. Athletes are instructed to run at the location of their choosing, times are recorded off their GPS data, graded via the participant’s age and top performers given points toward a series ladder.
 
At least two more events are planned but the surge in popularity is likely to see the series continue on until regular competition resumes.
 
A free event that is not restricted to club members, the series is open to the general public regardless of their location.
 
“It’s fantastic to see our club coming together and staying connected virtually during this difficult time,” Virtual Race Club organiser Jake Stevens said.
 
“We were pleasantly surprised with the amount of interest it’s generated so far. I think we’ve really struck a chord with our runners who enjoy testing themselves, but also the social element which is missing at the moment. You see the comments on everyone’s runs, there’s a lot of encouragement and a good amount of banter too.”
 
“We’ve had entries from right across the Peninsula, up towards Melbourne, regional Victoria and even some from friends in Queensland and Western Australia.”
 
“The Virtual Race Club is a way our club can stay connected while keeping apart during this time.”
 
The Mornington Peninsula Athletic Club had recently achieved record membership following a successful summer track and field season in which they were promoted to one of the ten ‘Premier Division’ clubs across Victoria.
 
To get involved in the MPAC Virtual Run Club – visit the club’s website www.mpac.org or search for “MPAC Virtual Race Club” on Strava or the “Mornington Peninsula Athletic Club” group on Facebook.

​A few club members have mentioned over the last few weeks about being flat. I wondered whether they were monitoring their workload or just the distance they accumulated. I suspect the latter. Workload includes volume and intensity. So I thought I might provide some information about how to do this.
Why should you track your workload?

1. To help manage fatigue and performance in your training and use it to be at your best on the day of a target competition.
2. To help avoid injury.

How does it work?
You track your long term load, CTL(chronic training load 4 – 6 weeks), which approximates you your fitness score. You compare your load for the last week, ACL (Acute training load – 7 days), which approximates your fatigue, against your fitness score. If your ACL is higher than your CTL then you are in a state of fatigue. But that is ok and required while you are building your fitness. See the example WKO+ Performance Management Chart below you can get from downloading your watch files into software.

So the blue line is the CTL (fitness), the pink line is ATL (fatigue) the yellow line is the TSS or Training Stress balance which is the CTL – ATL.
You can see that as ATL gets further above the CTL the TSS (balance) gets very low. If it is too low you are going to struggle in your training. If you let your ATL get too far below your CTL, your balance goes right up, but at the expense of your fitness (CTL).
So the trick is to get your fitness (CTL) high but have the balance (TSS) about zero or slightly positive. Apparently some people actually perform better with a slightly negative balance (TSS). Once you get the hang of it you can put in estimates of your training load to see what will happen if you follow your training load, ie will you be over or under done come the big day.
If the fatigue (ATL) goes above 150% of the fitness (CTL), studies from 2015 showed that the athlete has a very strong possibility of becoming injured in the next 4 weeks! Similarly, if the athlete drops their ATL below 80% of the CTL, then goes back to full training, injury in the next 4  weeks is a big possibility. See the figure above where there is a red circle. The excessive workload was due to a much higher than expected workload during AFL boundary umpiring the day after a cross country race. The athlete sustained a hip flexor strain during a school athletics carnival not long afterwards.
Tracking your Workload.
There are three main pieces of software you can use. You can even use a spreadsheet. The formulas are in a book called The Runner’s Edge by McGregor and Fitzgerald if you want to do your own spreadsheet.
The different software applications available have their own positives and negatives. They are Training Peaks / WKO+, SportTracks and Golden Cheetah. Training Peaks/WKO+ and Golden Cheetah started out as cycling software then later added running and other activities. SportTracks started as running software and added cycling and other activities later.
Basically, you put in some details about yourself. It may be threshold pace or heart rate plus other stuff if you want to track it. The software then does the rest for you when you download your gps watch and or heart rate depending on the software. It does the calculations for you.

1. Training peaks / WKO+

Training Peaks is an online application that can be used on windows, mac and android. WKO+ is desktop software. They are not the same. WKO+ has far more possibilities for analysis.
Training Peaks has a free version, but that does not include training stress calculations or the Performance Management Chart. The paid version has an athlete edition and a coaches addition. The athlete addition cost $US 119/year or less over shorter time periods. The coach edition allows coaches to link to the accounts of their athletes and set their programs and see their results.
WKO+ costs $179. It allows multiple athletes and can sync to training peaks but you do not have to. For me, this is the best choice. It is cheaper in the long run and has better analytical possibilities.
To use It.
To calculate your training stress you need to know your threshold pace. So you may need to do a test or use a chart that works it out on a recent performance. You plug that in then it calculates everything for you. When threshold pace changes you can change it in the software from then on. All you have to do from here on is download you gps watch files and it is done for you. Easy!

      2.    SportTracks
Do not want to pay that much money! Try SportTracks. SportTracks has a Windows desktop (no Mac) and a mobile version. It has a lot a plugins to do all sorts of things you might find of interest.
The desktop version is currently $US63, the desktop and webversion combined is $79 + $59/year. The mobile version costs $US59/year. There is a coaches version that is $US39/month for 5 athletes ($5/extra athlete) plus your subscription.
To calculate Training Stress you have 2 options. They will both require plugins. The easiest is to wear a heart rate monitor. Training Stress is calculated on that if you input your threshold heart rate. So you may have to do a threshold test or use a standard estimate. If you do not have a heart rate monitor, there is a plugin that estimate running power from your gps file and uses power to work out your training stress. I do not know how accurate this is. Once again, you need to know your threshold power. There is a default put in but for best accuracy you would need to do a threshold test and see what you power average power was.

     3.   Golden Cheetah
Do not want to pay any money! Try Golden Cheetah as it is free. It has only recently included running but hopefully more is coming. It is a daunting piece of software at first and has a bit of a learning curve. Currently Training Stress for running can only be calculated using heart rate. Only one of the various Performance Management Charts will show this. The other are for cycling and use power. So if you do not have a heart rate monitor it cannot work out your training workload. However, there is a beta version of version 4 that like Sporttracks, can estimate running power from you gps watch. You can use the beta version or wait until it is formally adopted. Once again you need to input threshold heart rate or power.
 
Neither SportTracks nor Golden Cheetah, to my knowledge, can use running pace at the moment to calculate training workload. This probably makes Training Peaks / WKO+ the easiest to use. However, it is the most expensive.

Do not have a GPS Watch / Phone or a Heart Rate Meter. or possibly that is not very relevant to your activity.

Then you can use Rate of perceived Exertion (RPE). Using a scale of 1 - 10 for RPE. Work out your session Training Workload / stressby multiplying minutes of work by RPE. For interval type sessions you might have to break the session up and work out the stress for each section then add up the total. You can add RPE to Golden Cheetah and SportsTracks. UPDATE. Golden Cheetah has several Performance Management Charts and one that tracks RPE rather than heart rate or power. You can also set up a spreadsheet using RPE and create your own Performance Management Chart..
 
So I highly recommend you use one of these software applications. They have free trials. However, you need to collect data for more than 6 weeks before it is more meaningful.
 
A note to the triathletes amongst use. If you use this software, you cannot compare Training Stress from cycling and running in Training Peaks / WKO+ as they are simply not the same. That is one reason SportTracks and Golden Cheetah have the ability to convert to running power (I think). There is also a device called Stryd that you wear and estimates running power that enable running stress and cycling stress to be comparable.

Craig Mahony