RPE the key to pacing

In all of the experiments done on endurance athletes around oxygen uptake of the muscles, lactic thresholds, breathing rates etc. It has become clear that the final limiting factor on your endurance performance is how the activity ‘feels’. It’s your brain that has the final say on just how fast and for how long you can run, not the muscles. It is also the brain that controls just how much pain you feel.

Our brains are always trying to preserve the physical body, keep us alive and out of harms way. It is also constantly looking for the most energy efficient way of doing things (which is a topic for another time). It stands to reason then that some form of brain training will help our athletic performance. The first step in training the brain is getting a handle on how much effort it feels like you’re expending. Hence the RPE measure.

Future articles will be talking about ways in which we train the brain to ease the RPE of any run. These will include Mindfulness practice and an explanation on how some of the training sessions we do(HIIT, Threshold) influence our RPE on race day.

Rating of Perceived Exertion

Rating of Perceived Exertion RPE or just PE is a subjective evaluation by the athlete of just how hard they are exerting themselves. The Borg rating of perceived exertion is a scale ranging from 6 – 20 where 6 is no exertion at all and 20 is maximal exertion.

The table below show a modified Borg Scale. The modified scale is more practical from a training point of view and it’s the one we use. I have added in a Race effort and HR percentage of max for reference purposes. Race Effort is a maximum effort for the distance indicated.

Our ultimate goal is to run on Perceived Effort only.