A scientific approach for Mt. Whitney hiking (2)~ A better strategy to hike 14,00 feet class mountains

West side of the main ridge on Mt.Whitney Trail

Today, I am writing what is available to look into the tracking data and a concept of the heart rate based training for running.

Visualize tracking data

One of key thing to look into a tracking data is how we can visualize the data.  I think this is a key to get some idea from the tracking data.

There are many vendors to sell such GPS product in the market place.   Since my first GPS device from Garmin, I have a couple different GPS devices from Garmin.  So all data for this posting is captured by a Garmin device.   There are some other vendors / manufactures offer similar devices.  So you might get a similar data from a device from other vendors.

Each vendor usually provides an application and / or a web service to visualize the tracking data.  For example a plot of the pace, the elevation, the heart rate and so on.   People can see overall profile and statistics from them.   It also show a track where people ran / walked.  At least, people can see the overall idea how they performed for each activity.   Accumulating activities is one of motivation to do running, hiking and etc.

Heart Rate based training

Because of those device, heart rate based training is also getting popular in running world.  Before those device is getting popular, it was not really easy to track the heart rate information during each training.  There was no good way to capture the real time heart rate information.  So that people sets their goal for a training / a race based on a pace and / or total time.   However, it is not really easy to set the right goal for many people.  I guess the goal is tended to be too high / hard for most of people.

The heart rate based training is using a “target heart rate” to define the strength of training.   The heart rate value has some relationship with the strength of exercise based on many studies.   Based on the heart rate value, we can define a strength of exercise instead of using pace.  Also, a person’s condition / situation can be vary for each training, sometime a person is getting very tired, or not the best condition something like after sickness and so on.   Then even the same physical strength, the stress level to the body could not be the same.   Using a pace for index, then people need to adjust it based on the condition.   However, the heart rate is already including those factor.  Therefore, people can use the same heart rate value for each training.   People can define the strength more logical way if they use the heart rate as an index.

I am not talking about a top level runners, I am talking about a regular numbers who is challenging their personal record for fun.   A long distance race like “full marathon”, the pacing is one of a key factor to get a better result.   To optimize the pace for a race is a key to get a good result.   Especially over pacing is not very good way for long distance running.  I think a similar methodology can be applied for hiking, especially if it is a sort of long distance.  That is the motivation, I wanted to look into the record for each hiking.

Direction for this series of posting

 Today's post does not seems to be related "hiking" at all.  But they are very important to look into the real tracking data for hiking.  "Visualization" is important because we need to see what each data profile looks like.  Then we also want to see the relationship with the heart rate.   Then we can apply a similar concept of "heart rate based training" to "hiking".

Next post will talk about altitude and heart rate.

(To be continue)