Getting Started – Why another book?

Getting Started – Why another book?

‘Getting Started’ is my third book about Running with Power. It’s the book I most enjoyed writing.

After ‘The Basics’ and ‘Why would you?’ I thought I was done.

But then I started to explore wrist-based power and realised that runners who wanted to try Running with Power using the power meter built into their running watch had little or no guidance about how to do that.

Book goals

I aimed to meet the following goals:

• No assumption of a particular power meter – runners could choose the Stryd footpod, the power meter built into their watch, or any other
• Lots of advice on making the right equipment and app choices – the right choices result in usable running power metrics with minimum manual effort
• Enough ‘power concepts’ content to provide a solid foundation – with an emphasis on making those concepts easy to understand and apply
• A learning by doing approach to support the concepts and to start using power – an emphasis on actually ‘getting started’
• Minimal overlap with the existing books – I didn’t want to produce ‘more of the same’

Book outline

With the above goals, and after considering a few alternatives, I landed on the following book structure:

1. Equipment & Apps. Information about potential choices, and how they could be to combine into something that worked.
2. Fundamental Concepts. The key concepts underlying Running with Power, to provide a solid foundation for future learning and fine-tuning. This part would include activities that runners could use to try out power.
3. Setups & Configs. Because Running with Power is still relatively new, things don’t always work as smoothly as they ought to. This part would provide detailed setup and configuration information to make it easier (and quicker) to arrive at a working setup.

The testing team

With the goal and outline in place, I realised I was going to need help …