Monday, January 18, 2010

More on Treadmill Charts

After looking at the two treadmill charts that I posted yesterday I realized an inconsistency and wanted to share my findings. At lower grades both the Daniels and hill runner tables seem to be fairly close on effort paces, but at the higher grades and faster speeds there are some huge discrepancies.

For example running at 7mph on 4% grade is equivalent to 7:24/mi on the Daniels table and 7:34 on the hill runner table, but at 7.5mph on 10% grade Daniels says is equal to 5:00/mi effort and hill runner says 6:02/mi effort. That is a HUGE difference.

Elite US marathoner, Nake Jenkins, said on his old blog that he was trying to find a speed and grade that would mimic his marathon pace (5:00/mi) for his winter treadmill workouts. He tried the hill runner pace which recommended 9.5mph on a 10% grade and could only make it one minute! Daniels chart says that amount of speed and incline is equal to sub 4 min mile pace. Then he tried the Daniels recommendation for 5:00 pace on 10% grade which was 7.5mph and that, he felt, was much closer to marathon pace effort.

I have used the Daniels table in the past, and although it is not as detailed and harder to decipher, I also find it to be very accurate. I would recommend using the Daniels table over the hillrunner table for your workouts.

2 comments:

Chuck said...

I appreciate the additional information.

rwhill said...

Thanks for pointing these discrepancies out. Honestly, the chart on Hillrunner.com was simply a copy of a chart made elsewhere on Daniels' work but, obviously, there's a discrepancy between the charts and I can't explain where that came from.

Honestly, I run on treadmills very little myself so I haven't tested the chart thoroughly. I simply found myself referencing the chart elsewhere a lot when answering questions on forums and finally asked the author if I could make a copy of it on the website.

I will take a look into the source of the chart and maybe see if I can find something more on it or an update to it. A 10% grade is quite significant. It would make sense to me that the effort level would be more difficult than the chart on Hillrunner.com suggests.