Quick question: How do you know what threshold pace is for a boy who runs 10:30 for 3,200m? Or what should a girl who ran 5:30 last spring be able to run for a 3,200m time trial?
If you’re thought is, “I’ll just look it up in Jack Daniels’s book” or “I’ll go to McMillan’s calculator” then you are I are kindred spirits. But since February I’ve been using Michael Pollard‘s PaceWheel to quickly get the same Vdot based information that the Daniels book or McMillan’s calculator give.
The PaceWheel - a great coaching tool
The PaceWheel‘s function is intuitively obvious if you’ve looked at the Daniels table. You simply turn the wheel until you find a PR at a specific distance (I’m usually using the mile PR) and it then has the PRs that the athlete should be able to run from 800m to the marathon distance. The wheel also gives the other parameters of the Daniels method in color coded sections. While I’ve never coached more than 20 athletes at a time, I can only imagine how useful this tool is for a coach who is trying to do a good job coaching dozens of athletes.
The wheel serves two primary functions for me. First, I like the simply ability to go back and forth between the current season best for an athlete and the goal performance (i.e. date pace and goal pace in Bowerman terms) and see the respective times over longer distance. One problem with the PaceWheel is that because it is based on Daniels’s tables you should be careful with the 800m to 5k or 10k correlations; a good HS MD runner might not be able to run for 5k what the wheel/table prognosticates due to low training volume and intensity…this is not a reason not to use the PaceWheel or Daniels’s table, but something to be mindful of. The second, more specific use, is to hone in on Vo2max pace, which is roughly 3,000m pace. Obviously we all need to assign some Vo2max work and this is a quick way to figure out what that is. That said, I often go back one set of PRs on the wheel when assigning Vo2 work as it give the athlete room to speed up during the workout (and we’re often doing Vo2 workouts when they’re at sea-level and I can’t see them, so that built in cushion helps injure that the workout goes well).
Michael has given the readers of the blog a special price of $13.95 – just click here.
