Runners, swimmers, cyclists, and athletes in other sports often drill, practice, or workout by training at a fixed percent of their best times. For example, a runner may want to run four heats of 1 mile at 85% of his best time or a swimmer may want to swim ten heats of 100 freestyle at 80% of her best time. Athletes and coaches need to compute these target times, but figuring them out off the top of one’s head isn’t easy. Raccoon’s Training Times Generator makes it easy to lookup the number.
Tom’s best 1 mile time is 4:34 and he wants to run 4 heats at 85%. How fast should Tom run? Tom uses the 3 to 6 minutes by 3 seconds table. Under the 100% column, Tom finds the closest time, which is 4:33. Tom scans that row over to the 85% column and finds target time of 5:21. If Tom wanted to, he could interpolate between 5:21 and 5:24 and choose a target time of 5:22.
Sue’s current best time to swim the 200m freestyle is 2:03.45 and the 200m backstroke is 2:17.89. The world record for the 200m freestyle is 1:52.98 and for the 200m backstroke is 2:04.06 (in August 2012). So, Sue might want a personal table that goes from 110 seconds to 140 seconds by 1 second.
From To By Format
The ‘format’ field controls whether 73 seconds shows as ‘73’ or ‘1:13’ or ‘0:01:13’ and whether 65 minutes shows as ‘3900’ or ‘65:00’ or ‘1:05:00.’ The ‘from’ and ‘to’ times must be at most 1 day. The ‘by’ times must be at least 1 second and at most 1 hour. The tables can show up to 1000 rows, but for best effect, use 50 to 60 rows, which fits on one page.
The tables are intended for printing. Depending on your browser, printing can be tricky. To print the row colors, make sure that “print background texture” is turned on. To get the whole table on one page, make sure that “adjust text to page width” is turned off. You may also need use a smaller font.
© Copyright 2012 by L.B.S. Raccoon. All rights reserved.