Pace calculations for "cool down"

Don't take this the wrong way, but it's really pointless.  A ride is a ride.  What's important is that you are in the proper level of effort (i.e., HR, zone, RPE, whatever you use).  Unless it's a race, pace is utterly irrelevant (I assume you're keeping track of pace to monitor progress?  You'll see it whether you include warmup/warmdown in the total)

My training ride average paces are always 15 or so MPH due to lights, traffc etc.  My race paces are much higher.

I look at it this way.  The logs are there for YOUR use and understanding.  Do whatever you understand or makes sense to you, to reflect on later.  My 0.02.

For me, I started to not use the pace value most of the time because it included the warm up and cool down times like you said AND pace is generally of no use to me.  I enter the time, and the distance, and in the notes, I mention what the pace is for the main portion of the workout if it's particularily important to me (time trial).  I don't waste space with a seperate entry.  Also, for my average HR, I use the average HR for the main workout.  Including the WU and CD will give a false low average.

I also don't use pace at all for swims because of the rest breaks.  I may calculate split times, and again, add them to the notes of the workout.

Feel free to check out my logs, or anyone's logs that are open to the public for alternative ideas.  Just do what's comfortable to you.

its your log, do what you want. 

I did what you are talking about with my running, not my biking, when I 1st started logging my W/Os here.  I wanted to track my pace so that I could track progress.  I also didn't want to cheat my warm-up/cool down by pushing these harder then I should so that I could get a "better" pace for my log. 

Well it got difficult(and I'm lazy) to keep track of those warm-up and cool down times as well as the "main set"  so now I either log the whole thing as one work-out or I only bother logging my "main set". 

So how do I track my progress? As others have said, on race day!

A race is end to end time so that's how I track my workouts. If I have to change a flat the clock keeps ticking - it will be in the race so doing otherwise in training just sets unrealistic expectations for my race time.

Also, in a longer race (e.g. IM) I will be doing somewhat of a warmup on the bike. There's no way I'm going to hop and and hammer it at full pace from the start.

Gerrard

slake707 - 2008-09-18 8:29 PM whats warm up and cool down?  

Warm up is the swim

Cool down is the run

You can always log 3 seperate bike workouts- log your warm up, main session, and then cooldown.  Now that we have the option in our blog it makes it easier to track than before.

Sometimes when I do a tempo run or intervals and have to hold a certain pace for so many miles I'll log my main session seperately.  That why I can go back and compare for improvement purposes.  I don't really care what my wu and cd paces are- because those are supposed to be fairly easy.  Having a Garmin makes this really easy to do.