The alarm goes off: it's 7 a.m.… I've got 30 minutes to get ready, have breakfast and dash off to work… It's 8:30, I'm stuck in traffic and I've got an appointment at 9…
These are just a few typical examples from our everyday lives. We try to keep total control of our time, but it isn't always possible, and we live in a society completely ruled by it. Our days are scheduled by the hour, minute and second… and we rush to make sure not a single millisecond slips away so we can keep up with our daily to-dos. And very often, that becomes a major source of stress…
But at last OUR MOMENT arrives and we head out for a run. And yet, paradoxically, we often stay tethered to the clock. We start our stopwatch and away we go, counting every minute, second and tenth of a second our workout takes. The stopwatch can be a great ally for staying motivated and tracking our progress objectively, sure, but when the clock doesn't give us the times we want, it can backfire and sap our motivation to keep training. We often forget that our performance “on the clock” can depend on our physical, mental and emotional state. A good time doesn't always mean a good workout, and vice versa. Very often, the attitude, drive, commitment and effort we bring to a run are the key to improving and outdoing ourselves every day. That's why, sometimes, it's better to leave our stopwatch in the bedside drawer and run by feel. That said, there are ways to gauge our intensity through a subjective, perception-based assessment, such as the RPE scale (Rating of Perceived Exertion) created by Gunnar Borg.
In sports science, this scale has been used both in practice and in research, because it allows a quick, simple, inexpensive, yet valid and reliable assessment of the effort made during exercise. And each of us can use it at the end of our run, rating how we feel. That way, we'll know how hard we've pushed ourselves and that we've trained properly, no matter how long it took us.
As you can see in the image, Borg's RPE scale ranges from 6 to 20 (multiply by 10 and you get 60-200, which matches the theoretical heart rate range of the human body), where 6 means minimal effort and 20 means maximum effort. As a rough guide, values between 13 and 14 correspond to a pace that feels a little intense but that we can hold fairly comfortably while running; values of 17 and above represent a hard effort we can't sustain for long on a run.
Although the RPE scale doesn't give us objective information about intensity, since it's based on our own perception, it does have plenty of advantages. For one thing, it lets us assess our training without being “hooked” on the clock. It also makes us reflect on our own effort and our overall state after training, which helps us get to know ourselves better and learn to recognize our own signs of exercise-induced fatigue. We can even use it before our run: it can help us check our physical and emotional state going into the workout and adjust its intensity.
In short, it can be a really useful tool for giving ourselves time to feel, guided by our own sensations, not by the numbers on the stopwatch.
Eva Parrado – PhD in psychology, specializing in sports.