[johnnyleemail@yahoo.co.uk]

Hi Matt, David,

Ive just bought one of your 70.3 plans with the running by pace. Ive done a bit of googling around converting pace outside to pace on a treadmill. Ive found some interesting stuff on a US site that provides a table with various treadmill incline percentages listed from 0 – 10% and the equivalent outside pace. But I wondered if you have any formulas you work from when converting.. or even a conversion table maybe. Thanks, John

[Matt Fitzgerald]

Hi John,

Thanks for your plan purchase. I’m familiar with those tables, and although I’ve used them myself, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in them. Part of the problem, I think, is that most treadmills are poorly calibrated, so the speed you see on the display is very likely not your real speed. I’ve found that a bit of trial-and-error is required to find appropriate incline/speed combinations for various workout formats. We don’t have conversion tables of our own, alas.

Matt

[Charles]

I’ve been using my Garmin watch for treadmill workouts which is self calibrating to my outside runs. While I am not convinced that it is perfectly accurate wrt pace/stride length, the cadence is be good, and of course the HR is accurate.

I can get incline information for planned races from other sources (I use Ride with GPS) and use that information to include some hill efforts into my treadmill workouts to practice the effort.

I think that is enough even though the mathematics is lacking.

[Author]

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