One of the useful parts of the Team SQUADRUN platform is that athletes can choose how they want to guide their training. Some people like pace. Some people prefer heart rate. Some people have running power. None of those methods are perfect. All of them can be useful when used sensibly.
To train by heart rate or running power inside Team SQUADRUN, you need to enter your approximate threshold heart rate or threshold running power into your profile page. Once that information is in your profile, the platform can use it to guide training intensity in a way that is more individual to you.
Threshold is usually thought of as the effort you can sustain for about an hour. In practical running terms, many athletes can run close to threshold pace for about sixty to sixty six minutes. That does not mean it is comfortable. It is not jogging. It is not easy. It is a strong, steady, controlled effort that you can hold for a long time, but only if you concentrate and stay honest.
Take your current 5 km time and put it into an online race predictor, such as the Luke Humphrey Running race equivalency calculator. That will give you predicted paces across different race distances and efforts.
What you are looking for is the pace you should be able to sustain for about sixty to sixty six minutes.
Once you have that predicted sixty to sixty six minute pace, write it down in minutes per kilometre.
Then, when you have a suitable day, go out and run a flat 10 km at that pace.
This is not meant to be a race. It is not meant to be a heroic suffering festival. You are not trying to prove anything to Strava, your mates, your dog, or the suspicious old man who always seems to be standing by the dairy. You are trying to produce clean, useful data.
Choose a flat route. Ideally choose somewhere with minimal interruptions. Avoid road crossings, gates, big climbs, technical trail, loose gravel, and places where you know you will need to stop. A track, flat cycle path, waterfront, quiet road loop, or smooth park loop can all work.
Warm up properly first. Do some easy jogging, let your heart rate rise gradually, and give your body enough time to settle. You do not want to launch straight from standing still into threshold pace and then use the first kilometre of chaos as meaningful data.
Once you start the 10 km, settle into the target pace and hold it as evenly as possible. Smooth is the point. The best version of this test is almost dull. Same pace. Same effort. Same rhythm. Click, click, click.
Afterwards, look at the activity in Garmin Connect, Strava, Coros, or whatever platform you use. The platform is not really the important bit. The important bit is that you can see your pace, heart rate, and running power across the steady section of the run.
Ignore the warm up. Ignore any early weirdness. Ignore the first part of the effort where your heart rate is still catching up. What matters is the section where you were actually running at the target sixty to sixty six minute pace and everything had settled.
Look at the heart rate you were holding through the majority of that steady section. That is probably a fair approximation of your threshold heart rate.
If you use running power, do the same thing with power. Look at the power you were holding through the majority of that steady section. That is probably a fair approximation of your threshold running power.
There is one important caveat. You need to check for cardiac drift.
Cardiac drift is when your heart rate slowly climbs even though your pace and effort stay about the same. Some drift is normal, especially in warmer conditions or longer efforts. But if your heart rate climbs significantly while your pace remains unchanged, it may suggest that the session was affected by heat, dehydration, fatigue, poor pacing, terrain, or simply that the chosen pace was a bit too hard for your current fitness.
For this test to be useful, you want the data to look boring. Pace steady. Power steady if you are using it. Heart rate rising early, then reasonably stable. If your heart rate starts at 155, creeps to 158, then sits around 160 for much of the effort, that is probably useful. If it starts at 155 and ends at 176 while pace is falling apart and you are bargaining with several deities, that is not clean threshold data.
Running power can be especially useful here because it responds more quickly than heart rate. Heart rate lags. It is affected by heat, fatigue, caffeine, stress, sleep, hydration, and whether your kid decided that 3.17 am was a sensible time to discuss dinosaurs. Power tends to respond more immediately to the mechanical work you are doing. That makes it useful for pacing, especially on rolling terrain.
Heart rate, however, tells you something power does not. It gives you insight into your internal physiological load. Two runs at the same power can feel very different if you are tired, hot, dehydrated, stressed, or under recovered. That is useful information.
This is why none of these metrics should be treated as magic. Pace, heart rate, power, and RPE all tell you something. None of them tell you everything.
Pace works beautifully on flat, predictable terrain. It is simple and easy to understand. If the session says 5.30 per kilometre and you are running 5.30 per kilometre, there is not much mystery.
But pace becomes much less useful on complex terrain. On hills, technical trails, mud, sand, wind, and rough surfaces, running speed can stop reflecting the true cost of the effort. A 6.30 kilometre on steep trail might be harder than a 4.45 kilometre on flat road. That is where heart rate and power can be helpful.
Running power can give you a better sense of output when pace is distorted by gradient or surface. Heart rate can give you a better sense of how hard your body is working to support that output. Together, they can help you train more intelligently when pace is not the best guide.
That matters for trail runners, ultra runners, and anyone who trains somewhere lumpy. Which, in New Zealand, is basically everyone who leaves their driveway.
Once you have your estimated threshold heart rate and threshold running power, enter them into your Team SQUADRUN profile page. They do not need to be perfect. In fact, they will not be perfect. That is fine. They just need to be close enough to help guide training.
A number that is approximately right and used consistently is usually more useful than a number that you never establish because you are waiting for perfect testing conditions, a lab appointment, and the emotional strength to do a brutal all out time trial.
You can also repeat this process every so often. Fitness changes. Threshold changes. Heat changes things. Fatigue changes things. Training changes things. If you set your threshold heart rate or power once and then never revisit it, it may become less useful over time.
A sensible approach would be to review it every couple of months, or after a clear change in fitness. If you run a new 5 km best, race well, complete a strong benchmark session, or notice that your zones feel obviously wrong, update your numbers.
You do not need to obsess over tiny changes. If your threshold heart rate estimate is 164 bpm, it does not matter much whether the true number is 162 or 166. Training is not that fragile. The body is not a spreadsheet. Close enough is close enough.
The biggest mistake athletes make with metrics is pretending they are more precise than they are. Your watch is useful, but it is not a divine oracle strapped to your wrist. Heart rate monitors can read wrong. Wrist based heart rate can be messy. Running power varies between devices. Race predictors are estimates. Conditions matter. Your body is a moving target.
So use the numbers, but do not worship them.
The best use of threshold heart rate and threshold running power is to help you make better training decisions. They are there to guide effort. They are especially useful when pace is misleading. They can help you avoid turning steady runs into secret races. They can help you keep easy runs easy. They can help you understand whether a session was controlled, sustainable, and repeatable.
That last word matters.
Repeatable training is the whole game. We are not trying to win Tuesday. We are trying to train often, recover well enough, and stack useful work week after week. Training frequency matters. Consistency matters. Small bouts of appropriate stress, applied often, are what build durable runners.
So by all means, use heart rate. Use running power. Use pace. Use RPE. Use the data available to you.
Just remember what the data is for.
Train often. Keep it repeatable. Build the routine first. Extend the volume once that routine is normal. Add intensity last.
