Measuring Performance and Improvement of Amateur Runners

The main idea behind the project was to construct some sort of tool that could help runners, with a TomTom sports watch, in their training, by analysing the data that TomTom has available. Although, still far from reaching the desired goal, this project resulted in many useful insights. In order to construct such a tool training performance and improvement need to be quantified. Although the distinction between the concepts of performance, relative performance, ability (or fitness level) and physical capability are made, the quantification remains to be specified. Many approaches on how to do this are looked into and through this topics like race detection, training type detection and predicting the maximum heart rate are addressed. The first two topics had promising results and might be applied in practice in the near future. On the other hand, for predicting the maximum heart rate extensive research required.

This thesis explores measuring performance and improvement in amateur runners using TomTom data.