Hit Your Stride

NEW TECHNOLOGY IS STRIVING TO MAKE POWER THE NEXT GREAT METRIC FOR RUNNERS

- Alex Hutchinson

WHEN A 400-YARD tunnel in the opening mile of last fall’s Chicago Marathon garbled the pace data on her GPS watch, Nicole Lane didn’t panic. The 25-year-old was aiming to dip below the threshold of two hours 45 minutes to qualify for this year’s Olympic Trials in Atlanta, but she wasn’t too concerned about splits. Instead, her coach, former 2:16 marathoner Steve Palladino, had given her strict instructions the night before: aim for a power output between 218 and 219 watts. “There were definitely times when I felt pretty good and thought about speeding up,” she recalls, “but seeing the power get higher than what Steve gave me, I would slow down.”

The first wearable power meter for running, from a Boulder, Colorado, startup called Stryd, was launched in 2015. Since then, engineers and biomechanists have been squabbling over the true definition of running power—and curious runners have been checking it out on the trails. Heavyweight competitors Garmin and Polar have now joined the fray with running power apps that harness the monitoring abilities of their existing devices, and Stryd recently launched a radical revamp of its foot pod that enables it to measure and correct for the effects of wind speed in real time. Power, in other words, is making its bid to be the new running metric of choice. And for Lane, who crossed the finish line in 2:42:26 and secured her trip to Atlanta with an average power of exactly 218 watts, the verdict is already in.