NOTES

Welcome to the reboot of Nerd Athletic! After a year-long hiatus following the arrival of our second child11Having a kid is really hard work. Having two is more than twice as hard. It's been particularly tough because we don't have much in the way of help, hence why I haven't had the opportunity to do much else than get up, eat breakfast, do parenting, work, run, eat lunch and work, put the kids to bed, eat supper, go to bed by 9pm.Having a kid is really hard work. Having two is more than twice as hard. It's been particularly tough because we don't have much in the way of help, hence why I haven't had the opportunity to do much else than get up, eat breakfast, do parenting, work, run, eat lunch and work, put the kids to bed, eat supper, go to bed by 9pm., I'm excited to return to writing. While sleep deprivation and nappy changes took precedence over blogging, those early parenting days are now behind us - our little one is thriving on solid foods and (mostly) sleeping through the night.

In my previous blog iteration, I was in the middle of writing a series on analysing FIT files from running activities. While that was interesting, I'm shifting gears to something more compelling: a comprehensive series about hill running. I'll be exploring these key questions:

  1. What are the physiological impacts of hill running? Why do I get out of breath quickly running up hills? Why do my legs hurt after running downhill?
  2. What's the latest research on the topic?
  3. Actually how much harder is running up hills (and easier running down)?
  4. What is grade adjusted pace and how do we calculate it from our running data?
  5. Can we build a personalised model to track our hill running capability?
  6. Can we put together some useful hill running metrics?
  7. Can we use elevation to better calculate recovery needs and training load?

This topic is particularly relevant to me as I live in a hilly area and find current hill running analytics tools lacking in depth and usefulness. In addition to this series on hill running, I'll also be publishing posts about critical speed - another key training concept. These topics are closely connected for me: understanding grade adjusted pace is essential for critical speed calculations, as we need to normalize our pace data for hills before feeding it into the critical speed model.

Looking ahead, I plan to enhance the blog with a mailing list and cross-post content to Substack and other relevant platforms. This will make it easier for readers to stay connected and access the content through their preferred channels.