openrun/NatesNotes.md

Nate — Personal Findings

Working notes from PT (Eisley), self-observation, and race experience. Last recap: 2026-06-12 (day before the 30K).

Cadence & HR — the two numbers that matter

• 170 spm is ideal; natural cadence is 161 — body falls back to it when not consciously cued.
• Holding ~170 has made HR consistently maintainable < 145 (top of Z2 is 143) — at the cost of running slower. That trade is the point.
• Watch datafield: big HR + cadence only — the only fields needed in training.
• Current block (week of Jun 5–12): mostly low-HR walking, deliberate.

Breathing

• 3 strides in / 2 out.
• Noticed the diaphragm very often lands in the same position on the same foot — odd-count breathing (3/2) rotates which foot takes the exhale impact.

Nutrition

• I have undernourished in races.
• Goal: 80 g carbs/hour during long efforts.
  • At 30K (~3.5 h?) that's ~280 g total — plan bottles/gels ahead, don't wing it.

Gait / form cues (Eisley)

• Problem: knee forward / stepping too far out front → lose momentum, hard strike, pulling instead of pushing.
• Cue: "run on ice" — feet land underneath, push backward.
  • This revealed weakness and asymmetry in feet/ankles/legs; in particular the left foot struggles to load the medial side during pushoff.
• Cue: feeling of winding/turning the feet — sup on lateral, inf on medial — aligns with the medial-MTP avoidance; good cue.
• Ice-walk stride note from injury rehab (2026-03-08): shorter, less out-in-front steps; cue of rotating musculature from inner to outer (pull meat back from inside inner ankle bone, push out behind outer ankle bone) felt good.

Anatomy observations

• Asymmetry in the motion of each leg.
• Feeling of legs out of socket / tailbone out of place / sacrum twisted(?).
• Tightness + weakness where the collarbones join — the feel of pulling that area down seems right; likewise shoulders feel out of socket or twisted.

Injury history

• 2026-03-07, right leg: right inner leg felt "short", tending to limp, unable to pull the right leg back far; legs heavy, cardio fine. Rehabbed via the ice-walk stride work above (see ../RunningLogs.md).

PT exercises (Connor Harris, YouTube)

• Big toe ball exercise: side faces wall; forearm against wall, opposite leg slightly lateral; raise wall-side leg (marcher); lift body with the far leg, focus on pressing into the big-toe ball; imagine lifting the toes from the ground.

50M training strategy

• Races: 30K 2026-06-13, 50K 2026-07-25, 50M 2026-09-12.
• Minimize Z3 junk miles — polarize: Z2 volume + deliberate quality.
• Low-HR walking counts as training (time on feet) even though the dashboard currently ignores non-running activities.

Race fueling

Plans, product reference, and the carb science live in RaceLogistics.md. Personal takeaways: target 80 g/h (history says I under-fuel), both Tailwind and Hammer Gel are glucose-dominant — pushing past ~85 g/h with this stack needs more fructose, not more gels.

Where this lives in the data / web UI

Finding	Surfaced today?
HR < 145 / zone discipline	✅ Time-in-zone (Activity Detail), polarized split (Dashboard)
Minimize Z3 junk	✅ Dashboard "Polarized split (last 12 weeks)"
Aerobic base quality	✅ Pa:HR decoupling (Activity Detail)
Cadence 170 vs 161	❌ not shown anywhere, though per-second cadence is in every FIT
80 g carb/hr fueling	❌ nothing — Race Plan page could compute totals from projected duration
Walking / time-on-feet	❌ Dashboard filters to type="running" only
3/2 breathing, form cues	n/a — not watch-measurable; lives in this file