Cooper test

A Cooper test is a benchmark run that you can use to estimate your VO2 max. It’s pretty simple. You go to a track. Then, well, you just start running like a crazy person until the 12 minutes are up. That’s pretty much it.

The problem is that unless you’re a professional athlete running 12 minutes at maximal effort will pretty much grind you to dust. Don’t even consider doing it if you have the slightest worry about your heart, or if you still have weight to cut, or if you’ve recently recovered from an injury. But if you’re feeling pretty good about you’re training a Cooper test will set an important benchmark, when you look back for years to come you’ll know the answer to what you were really capable of.

If you’re a Smashrun pro user you can tag your run as a Cooper Test and you’ll get a special view of your run on the by run page. You’ll see an estimate of your VO2Max, and a rating of your VO2 Max based on your age/gender. You’ll also be able to compare this Cooper test to other ones you’ve run in the past.

This week we also added a new setting on the profile page to make all of the labels brighter on the report pages. When you set it, the pages might be a little less clean looking but they’ll definitely be easier to read.

We’ve added a new visual layer to Smashrun’s Overview pages! Now you can interact with the distance charts, Trailing mileage charts, Runs distance vs. pace, and an infinitely more useful version of Days run vs. days without.

The interactivity should provide more transparency to your data so you can actually dig in and discover additional metrics such as number of runs, average pace in different time periods, % of runs above a certain distance or pace, without ever having to leave your Overview page. Here’s the detailed rundown.

Miles/kilometers per month/day

Mouse over any of the bars within Miles/Kilometers per month to see number of runs, total distance, and average pace. Average SPI will also show up for Smashrun Pro users. If you click on a given month, it will take you to that month’s overview page. Likewise, if you’re on the month view and you click on a day, it will take you to the run.

In addition, you can also mouse over the values along the y-axis, to see which percentage of your runs (or which months/days) are greater than a certain distance. This allows you to get a better sense of your base mileage – plus, it’s kind of interesting to see how much of your monthly volume or daily runs are above or below a certain distance!

Trailing mileage charts

This has always been a bit tricky to explain. Because it’s “trailing”, any given point along a trailing mileage chart is the cumulative result of a preceding period. In other words, it’s a rolling total distance.

Any point within the All Time view will show the period of one year, points within the yearly view will show the trailing 90-day period, and points within the monthly view will show the trailing 7-days.

Now that you can interact with the trailing mileage charts, you can actually see which months/days contributed to any point within the chart. You’ll also see which runs are included on the Miles/km per month, Runs distance vs. pace, and the daily/weekly stats calendar.

Runs distance vs. pace/SPI

Runs distance vs. pace chart (the scatterplot) now shows the % of runs faster than a certain pace and/or greater than a certain distance. This will give you a much clearer understanding of your run distribution. You can now also select a run from within the scatterplot and it will take you to the By Run page.

Move your cursor over the y-axis values to see what percentage of runs are faster than a certain pace. Mouse over the x-axis values to see what percentage of runs are longer than a certain distance. To see runs greater than a certain distance and pace, move your cursor within the scatterplot.

For Smashrun Pro users, you can switch the scatterplot to display Runs distance vs. SPI. This will help you compare your runs based on performance instead of average pace.

So if, for instance, you wanted a quick and easy way to spot your 10 best runs this month (or top 10 runs for the year or even all time!), now you can. And you can click on the run within the scatterplot to view its By Run page.

Weekly and Daily stats for the year/month

We replaced Days run vs. days without with a calendar heat map that visualizes your weekly and daily training volume. The colors will help you distinguish between the high and low volume weeks or days, which can be really useful when you’re reviewing your training history and you want to figure out in which weeks or days you ran the most. All you have to do is mouse over the distance brackets.

In the All Time view, it shows your weekly stats for each year. From this, you can see in which years you might have been training for an event like a marathon, because you’ll spot the high mileage weeks in white.

In the yearly view, you’ll see your daily stats for the year. Each day of the week has its own row. Because of this, you can answer questions like: on which days do I run the least distance or when do I usually run long?

In the monthly view, it’ll be the daily stats for the month, which includes the total distance for each week (just after every Sunday).

There were many breaking changes in this release, so please keep us posted and send us an email at hi@smashrun.com if you encounter any issues.

Other big changes…

• Importer – if you’re importing multiple runs for the same day (e.g. if you ran twice today), both runs will get imported at the same time whereas before every run entered the main import queue
• Prompt to publish – if your FB post preference is set to “prompt to publish” and you just imported multiple runs, the prompt will always default to the longest run that you just imported instead of the last run that was imported
• Same logic above applies to auto-publish
• iSmoothRun/Run.GPS users, and anyone importing via email: you should now get prompt to publish and post-import notifications
• Import via email – the “you’ve got mail” notification now only shows up once when bulk importing > 20 runs, otherwise you’ll just get the “we successfully imported your run” modal
• Multi-sport – you can now retrieve the run portion(s) of a multi-sport activity from Garmin Connect (yeah!)

We also recently updated the running apps page to reflect recent testing with Android apps and Windows Phone apps, and, in case you missed our last post, Smashrun is now integrated with RunGap (which can help you retrieve your stats from Strava and Suunto, among many others, and into Smashrun).

If you’re looking for an easy way to import your stats from Suunto, Endomondo, Strava, Polar, or Runkeeper into Smashrun, RunGap with Smashrun support is now available from the iTunes App Store. It’s a workout tracker that lets you consolidate your complete training history and back it up as you like. To export your data to Smashrun you’ll need to first unlock the “Swag Bag” ($.99 / 3mo) which will give you the ability to export directly to a large variety of apps, to save GPX/TCX files, and send data directly to other iOS devices locally or remotely via Airdrop.

How it works

First, you need to grab your existing activities from the app(s) you’re using. Under RunGap’s Tools section, select “Accounts & Settings” and add your app(s) including Smashrun.

Once your activities have imported into RunGap, select the menu > click on “Share & Export” > and choose Smashrun and any other sites you use. That’s all there is to it.

It’s a brand new integration, so if you come across any problems, don’t hesitate to reach out to support@rungap.com or hi@smashrun.com and we’ll sort it out.

We’re continuing to work our way through all the charts on Smashrun, making them interactive one by one. This weekend, we’re updating the pace chart on the bottom of the By Run page. It’s been a staple since Smashrun began, but it’s always been, let’s face it, kind of underwhelming. It’s a bar graph with pace, no more no less. We discussed ripping it out and starting fresh, adding some textures, and shadows, maybe a cute little bubble tooltip and a couple of gradients here and there.

Then we sobered up the next morning, and came to our senses. We realized that old run chart is a classic. It’s a pair of tried and true NB 574’s. Understated, free of pretense. It says how fast when. No animated bubble tooltip required. But we thought, what if we took that old classic and dropped a brand new engine in it?

Say hello to your new run chart. It’s just like the old run chart. But behold! It does stuff.

Mouse over your run graph, click and drag to select an area of your run. You’ll immediately see the average pace for the selected area. You can drag your selection, expand or reduce it, and see how your pace changed over various splits. The nice thing is that you can see any split you want. You can, for example, compare each 10k split of a marathon, or the pace of each effort and recovery over a set of intervals.

This new functionality is available for all users Pro and Free alike, but we cooked up something extra if you’re a Smashrun Pro user. We’ve added an elevation gain/loss chart just below the run chart. You can use this to find the elevation gain of individual climbs and descents, and compare your pace and average heart rate.

And when you double click any section it’ll open up in the pro map for further analysis.

We also took this opportunity to earn a few more grey hairs by doing some serious data reconciliation. We coded the run graph in one programming language, and the pro run map in another, so we could reconcile between them. With pauses, floating points rounding issues, and intermittent data this was no small feat. To make this all happen, we’ve also started interpolating meaningful trackpoints (if your watch records a point at 1.96km and at 2.07km, we estimate your pace/HR/cadence at 2.0km). We’ve added some minor GPS error correction, and we’ve revised our elevation calculations to use more sophisticated resampling and error correction techniques.

This was all, of course, a total, utter, and complete nightmare. And there’s no doubt that with millions of runs now in the system, you’re going to run into at least a few issues. Let us know what you find and we’ll sort it out.

Also there’s a terrifying new color picker by Megan Zombie.

PS: Some runs imported on Sunday will have incorrect calories. We’re working on correcting these. But any new runs imported starting Monday should be okay!