Joe Friel reposted an article earlier this year on Efficiency Factor in running. Efficiency Factor (EF) can be viewed in Training Peaks software and he describes how it is calculated. This post describes how I went about calculating EF in R using a single gpx file. What is Efficiency Factor (EF)? Essentially, EF is the average distance that you are propelled forward per heart beat. The higher the number, the more efficient you are at running.

On a whim a posted a plot on Twitter. It shows a marathon training schedule. This post explains the story behind the graph. I downloaded a few different 17-week marathon training schedules. Most were in imperial measurement and/or were written for time at a certain pace, e.g. 30 min Easy Run etc.

I recently got a new GPS running watch, a Garmin Fēnix 5. As well as tracking runs, cycling and swimming, it does “activity tracking” – number of steps taken in a day, sleep, and so on. The step goals are set to move automatically and I wondered how it worked. With a quick number crunch, the algorithm revealed itself. Read on if you are interested how it works.

2016 was the 400 year anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. Stratford-upon-Avon Rotary Club held the Shakespeare Marathon on the same weekend. Runners had an option of half or full marathon. There were apparently 3.5 K runners. Only 700 of whom were doing the full marathon. The chip results were uploaded last night and can be found here. Similar to my post on the Coventry Half Marathon, I thought I’d quickly analyse the data.

The end of the month sees the Coventry Half Marathon. I looked at what constitutes a good time over this course, based on 2015 results. I thought I’d post this here in case any one is interested. The breakdown of runners by category for the 2015 event. Male Senior (MSEN) category has the most runners, constituting a wide age grouping. There were 3565 runners in total, 5 in an undetermined category and 9 DNFs.

What was the best year in music? OK, I have to be upfront and say that I thought the answer to this would be 1991. Why? Just a hunch. Nevermind, Loveless, Spiderland, Laughing Stock… it was a pretty good year. I thought it would be fun to find out if there really was a golden year in music. It turns out that it wasn’t 1991.

In the lab we use IgorPro from Wavemetrics for analysis. Here is a useful procedure to plot all XY pairs in an experiment. I was plotting out some cell tracking data with a colleague and I knew that I had this useful function buried in an experiment somewhere. I eventually found it and thought I’d post it here.