Episode 3: Data — Your Best Friend or Your Worst Coach?

Amy and Suzie dive straight into the big question:

Is all this running data actually helping us… or quietly wrecking our training?

 

Suzie opens with a brutally honest debrief from the Sheep Tracks Fell Race — yes, she won the Champion Ewe trophy, but also ran herself straight into a fatigue crater thanks to fuelling mistakes and a marathon session days before.

Meanwhile, Amy’s week has been peak real‑life chaos: three kids with head lice, an ill cat, and her husband working away. Suzie wasn’t far behind, breaking down on the M56. Training still happened — not perfectly, not scientifically — but in the messy, flexible way that represents real life.

They unpack the gut‑health and fuelling webinar they both attended, then get into the real heart of the episode: data that helps vs. data that hijacks your training.

 

Heart rate gets a shout‑out as one of the few tools that can genuinely reign you in — stopping every run drifting into the grey zone, keeping easy runs actually easy, and preventing threshold sessions from tipping over LT2 into “ego pace”.

They break down training zones without the lab‑coat energy: why beginners don’t need to overthink it, why Suzie now prefers a simple three‑zone model, and how LT1 and LT2 can guide smarter sessions without becoming another stick to beat yourself with. They also talk about useful benchmark tests that don’t require a physiology lab: a hard parkrun as a 5K effort check‑in, and the classic MAF test (180 minus age) for a 30‑minute aerobic baseline.

 

And Amy lands the final punch: are we running well… or are we just running to produce good data?

 

📩How to contact us?

Amy: [email protected]

Suzie: [email protected]