How hard was it?
Tell Calcpace how a run felt — Easy, Moderate, Hard or Max — and your fitness, zones and predictions stop being dragged down by easy days.
Every VO2max formula assumes you ran as hard as you could. Most runs are not like that, and until now Calcpace had to guess which ones were: by how long they took, and by heart rate when there was one. Now you can just say.
Four levels, picked by feel
When you log or edit a run, there is a new Effort choice: Easy, Moderate, Hard or Max. It is optional, and there are no numbers to think about. Tap "How to choose" under it for a quick reminder: Easy is when you could chat freely, Max is everything you had, a race or a test. Leave it blank and nothing changes: the estimate uses duration and heart rate as before, and a race from Strava still counts as Max.
What it changes
A run marked Easy or Moderate still gets its VO2max, but it reads as "at least this": the number itself never changes, only how much it is trusted. It no longer counts as proof of your maximum: your fitness, zones and race predictions lean on your harder runs, and it gets no age grade or race equivalent. It still counts in your list, your totals and your records. A run marked Max is trusted as an all-out effort however long it took, unless your heart rate says you held back, so a marathon you raced now counts as fully as a 10K.
A floor instead of an average
If all your recent runs were easy, your fitness used to be the average of them, and the average of easy runs is low. Six easy runs used to give 38.4 and a 5K prediction of 24:57, to someone who had just run 5 km easy in 23:30. Now Calcpace takes the best of them as a floor: 41.4, and a 5K in 23:24, with a note saying it is at least that. A race or a session at your limit shows more.
The VO2max guide explains the four levels. The effort levels come from version 2.1 of the open-source calcpace library.