We caught up with Jess to ask her about her thoughts on the brand new COROS Pace 4, and here is what she had to say - 

Runners Paradise

1. How does COROS help you recover, and what are the key metrics you monitor to help track your recovery? 

The metrics highlighted on the COROS App are so detailed and thorough when it comes to monitoring recovery. There’s so much data to take in to help guide your training. I try to keep it simple and use the sleep data and resting heart rate to make adjustments. The actual recovery score calculated is also really helpful. The recovery score is calculated using your Base Fitness and Training Load scores. Knowing that the data is influenced by the way I’m training over time, not just from a one off session also helps me understand the effects of the cumulative training load I’m under. I also find that I’m intuitively a little more dialled into the 1 per centres knowing that every detail of the day can accumulate towards the way I’m recovering for the next session. Having the metrics available to assess and knowing that they’ll be influenced by how I’m recovering outside of sessions helps to keep me mindful of building good recovery routines off the track to help level up what I’m doing in training.

2. What is your favourite function on your COROS watch? 

The track mode feature! It keeps track of your volume perfectly across a track session. You don’t need to calculate the distances you’ve ran based on the intervals and the recovery periods after the session to get an accurate picture of the overall volume. We all know GPS can be a little off around athletics tracks, but COROS have found a way to counter this! Track mode also helps to keep all of your data that is being used to calculate your Base Fitness and Training Loads accurate with the precise distances recorded. You aren’t restricted to running in lane 1 either, you can select any lane of the track before you start the activity and it will keep track of your distance covered.

3. COROS have a great heart rate arm band. How do you use heart rate data to manage your effort in training? 

At this time of year, we’re training more effort based than split specific so heart rate is a good way to check in with my perceived effort. I try not to be too focused on it during a run, but to check in on it afterwards and make sure it’s in the zone that matches up with the effort level I felt like I was working at. In my sessions we are checking in on my heart rate in our recovery intervals to be sure I’m ready to start the next rep. If we need to take a little extra rest at this time of year to get my heart rate back down, we can. By listening to this across the session, I also recover faster from that morning’s training and that then has a knock on effect as it rolls into my afternoon run.

4. What is your favourite workout / track session and do you program the workout into the watch or manually split it? 

My favourite track session is 400m repeats! When we first introduce these each season, we aren’t doing them as fast so we might do up to 12 reps. As we move across the year the volume of this session reduces as the intensity increases. I don’t program it into the watch, I split it manually. If I’m doing a fartlek off the track, I’ll program it in so I’m not checking my watch as frequently, just running and waiting for the beep. I should probably start to try this for my threshold runs too!

5. The COROS Pace 3 is one of the lightest GPS watches available, would you consider racing with it? And what do you think your heart rate would have been in the last 5m of the World Champs 1500m final? 

Wait until you feel how light the Pace 4 is! I’ll be racing in it going forwards. I’m excited to match the different colour ways to my Nike uniform and our Australian uniforms. It’s so interesting to think what my heart rate could have been that last 5m in Tokyo! I think it would have been at it’s highest with about 50m to go and then I tried to remind myself to relax and get to the finish line, so maybe it dropped a couple of beats before going back up again after the finish line. I would guess somewhere between 200 and 210 based on how I felt in that moment! We will learn more as I start racing in the watch over the seasons to come! 

If you are interested in the latest GPS watch from COROS, and want to learn more about it's features, shop in store or online now, or come and talk to one of our friendly staff for more information.  You are bound to love it as much as Jess!