tryingtorun is a running performance website designed to present your speed and heart rate data in a way that makes it easy to understand how you performed after every run and how this impacts your fitness trend. The app allows you to link with your data provider (currently Garmin and STRAVA) to analyse your past runs and will also present your new runs as they are completed. This allows us to show you how you are performing by graphically representing your speed to heart rate relationship over time

More often than not runners download generic training plans from the internet and use them for their training. These training plans are well thought out but they are generic. Your individual profile (weight, fitness, experience etc) will determine how successful you will be with a programme but without a tailored plan this has a high risk of failure. tryingtorun has no view of your training plan but by showing you how your heart rate is responding to the work you are doing you can very quickly see if you are progressing or not. Most people equate more running with improved fitness, but if you are not getting adequate recovery or following a plan that is not well suited to you, then this will not be the case. tryingtorun takes the guess work out and shows you your data in a simple way so you can make the correct decisions

We believe so. Based on this research [paper](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24345970/) tryingtorun simply presents your heart rate data and speed relationship allowing you to determine how you are performing.

To measure performance tryingtorun looks at the relationships between heart rate and speed throughout any given run. A performance score is then calculated and you can use the app to see this score after every run as well as graphically over time.

Fitness is a difficult thing to define, never mind measure. tryingtorun defines fitness by considering how hard your heart needs to work to deliver a certain output. How this changes over time can then be used to calculate fitness. For example. If today you run a 5k and your average heart rate is 140bpm but next week you run the exact same distance and course and your heart rate is 136bpm then your heart worked less this week than it did last week. This result can be down to improved fitness or other factors like weather, health etc. But, tryingroun uses a specific agorithm to plot a trend across all of your runs so that you don't have to try and measure every signal that could possibly indicate fitness.

There are too many factors that can influence your run performance to measure them all. We also believe that trying to measure many signals suits device companies that want you to become dependant on their device. Instead, we just look at the most important trailing indicator of effort, heart rate. We then use a custom algorithm to smooth out any variations in your heart rate (whilst looking at time and distance covered) and present you with a trend graph over time which in essence is your fitness graph.

We believe that measuring fitness precisely is too difficult and has limited benefit for most people. Instead we focus on changes over time. These changes indicate whether or not you are improving or not and empower you to make the right decisions. We call that your fitness trend rather than just your fitness so that you focus on how it's changing rather than the actual value. Relative fitness looks at your fitness trend for a defined time block, so you can see when you peaked. VO2max is an absolute fitness measure that cannot be accurate without a lab test, so why focus on it? The fitness trend will show you all you need to know.

We prefer that you focus on changes (trend) to the score values over time rather than the actual or absolute values. But, if you are interested, the score is an estimate of the number of CMs you move for a stroke of your heart. As you become fitter your heart will work less hard and produce more CMs for a given beat. The value you receive is unique to you and shouldn't be compared to others. This is a benefit of the platform, as sometimes people get hung up on improving their VO2max, compared to others, so we don't use it

As long as you still measure heart rate, it does not matter to us. Power is a great way to get realtime feedback on how hard you are working during a run, whereas heart rate will lag behind as it is a response to increased effort. We use heart rate as we are only concerned with measuring performance after your run. We are considering using power when heart rate is not available if this becomes a scenario that people need, i.e. they record power but not heart rate.