By Gavin Kentch
Welcome back to “Get to know a skier’s Strava,” an occasional feature showcasing an athlete’s Strava account (or, here, the data from multiple athletes’ Strava accounts). Previously in this series: Federico Pellegrino, Michaela Keller-Miller, Pål Golberg Eats Breakfast, and John Steel Hagenbuch Goes Long. Very Long.
“’The heart rate is probably the least important variable in comparing athletes,” goes one established koan of exercise physiology. Scientifically speaking, some athletes’ hearts pump out a greater volume of blood fewer times per minute; others’ pump out less blood more frequently. Inter-athlete comparison on a basis of absolute heart rate is therefore of limited utility.
Anecdata-ly speaking, my maximum heart rate, or MHR, is approximately 10 beats higher than Jessie Diggins’s. That said, I have precisely 10 fewer global championship medals than she does. If it was MHR that determined race results — as opposed to other markers like efficiency, VO2 max, lactate threshold, ability to operate at a given percentage of MHR for an extended period, etc., let alone more intangible attributes like technique or grit — then my current USSS distance points would probably start with something other than, uh, this is embarrassing, 400. (Diggins currently has both USSS and FIS distance points of 0.00. Lower is better.)
I don’t have access to data points about VO2 max/LT/percentage of MHR for a tranche of world-class athletes. But I do have a free Strava account and a humanity major’s understanding of exercise science. Putting those two together, let’s take a look at some data from a recent race and see what we can learn.
101 men finished the 52-kilometer mass start classic rollerski race on Friday, August 22, the first day of the Toppidrettsveka sports festival in Trøndelag. Local boy made good Casper Kvam Grindhagen won the race, in a time of 2:10:02.0, despite, as one qualified observer put it, being “the only one not skating on the finish straight.” (Quote from below Insta post, which also has incriminating video evidence.) 20th place was just 8.9 seconds back of Grindhagen, and 30th place 52.0 seconds back over 52km. It was tight pack racing on a largely doublepole course.
I found reliable HR data for this race for 31 men overall, including 20 of the top 30 finishers. Hilariously, a full 29 of the top 30 men in last Friday’s race are on Strava. (Martin Kirkeberg Mørk, in 24th, is your one outlier. The other nine men not included in my data set either have a private account, did not log this race, or logged this race but did not make HR data public. Alas.)
I compiled the data in text form first. Sorted by ascending order of average HR, then by MHR for ties, that looks like this:
Andrew Musgrave: average HR 143, MHR 171
Håvard Solås Taugbøl: average HR 148, MHR 201
Mattis Stenshagen: average HR 149, MHR 184
Sivert Wiig: average HR 155, MHR 180
Erik Valnes: average HR 157, MHR 177
Jonas Vika: average HR 159, MHR 181
Thomas Maloney Westgård: average HR 160, MHR 179
Linus Engdahl: average HR 160, MHR 180
Gustaf Berglund: average HR 161, MHR 181
Håvard Moseby: average HR 161, MHR 195
Lars Agnar Hjelmeset: average HR 162, MHR 176
Amund Riege: average HR 162, MHR 184
Sivert Leander Johansen: average HR 162, MHR 186
Sondre Ramse: average HR 164, MHR 217
Hjalmar Oscarsson: average HR 165, MHR 196
Amund Flataker: average HR 167, MHR 181
Casper Kvam Grindhagen: average HR 167, MHR 191
Lars Michael Bjertnæs: average HR 168, MHR 185
Aron Åkre Rysstad: average HR 168, MHR 187
Thomas Joly: average HR 168, MHR 200
Harald Østberg Amundsen: average HR 170, MHR 185
Petter Stakston: average HR 170, MHR 188
Zak Ketterson: average HR 170, MHR 190
Preben Horven: average HR 170, MHR 204
Mathias Aas Rolid: average HR 171, MHR 189
Edvard Sandvik: average HR 172, MHR 192
Albert Sunde Øhlschlägel: average HR 172, MHR 194
Max Novak: average HR 173, MHR 191
Rémi Bourdin: average HR 176, MHR 197
Emil Liekari: average HR 177, MHR 195
Eskil Skarstein Rød: average HR 179, MHR 199*
Notwithstanding the quote that opened this article, there are some pretty darn low average HR figures at the top of this list: 149. 148. 143 (?!).
I was initially pretty dubious of these values, even for world-class athletes, but Muzzy’s Strava — which, by the way, is imho a must-follow — is replete with workouts showing a consistent 150 bpm for long intervals, an MHR of just 170 for fifth in the Lysebotn Opp doublepole, or easy rollerskis with an average HR in the high-90s, so let’s call this valid. If you’re curious how hard an efficient doublepole athlete is working when he’s sitting in the pack in a doublepole race on good pavement… maybe not that hard, is the answer. (Although also note that Zak Ketterson has a resting HR of approximately 35, so if that’s an athlete’s starting point then even “just” 150 is looking more strenuous from an HRR perspective than it might facially appear.)
Mattis Stenshagen (average HR: 149) was second in this race, Musgrave (average HR: 143) fourth, and Håvard Solås Taugbøl (average HR: 148) eighth, so it certainly appears that a lower average HR is correlated with a lower (i.e., better) finishing position. On the one hand, this is not incorrect. On the other hand, first place in Hitra, Casper Kvam Grindhagen in a breakout performance for the 21-year-old, was solidly midpack HR-wise with an average of 167, so physiology is not destiny.
There are some pretty strong correlations, though. Here are the average HR and MHR figures for each tercile of this data set, as well as for [those athletes that I had data for in] the top 30 as a whole:
| average HR | MHR | |
| places 1–10 (n=7) | 157.7 | 188.3 |
| places 11–20 (n=7) | 166.7 | 187.9 |
| places 21–30 (n=6) | 166.8 | 185.8 |
| places 1–30 (n=20) | 163.4 | 187.4 |
This seems telling to me: Top-10 finishers in this race had an average HR a full nine beats per minute lower than athletes who finished in 11th through 20th places (157.7 bpm versus 166.7). Their MHR values were effectively the same (188.3 versus 187.9); when they had to work hard, they were working just as hard as the athletes below them.
But otherwise? They were largely chilling out there. Taugbøl, in eighth — average HR 148, MHR 201 — is the archetype of this. Draw your own conclusions as to whether sprinters know how to move efficiently in groups, exerting effort only when they have to. You can also draw your own conclusions as to whether the top-10 men were operating at a lower percentage of their absolute MHR (i.e., the maximum HR determined in a test, not just the highest value observed in this race) than the athletes who finished below them. I think it is extremely plausible that they were, but absent those data I cannot be certain.
As noted above, this was pack racing at its finest. While first place in this race by definition skied faster than anyone else — that is, how can I put this, why he won — it feels fair to treat the top 20 athletes in the field as having skied effectively the same speed for purposes of comparing HR data. Indeed, 20th place was just 0.11 percent back of the winner at the finish, and 30th place still only 0.67 percent back.
The obvious contrast here is to something like the women’s 50km in Trondheim this March: 10th place there was 6.6 percent back at the line, 20th place 11.6 percent back, and 30th place 19.7 percent back. HR analysis as between athletes in a race like that is far more of an apples-to-oranges comparison, given that first place and 22nd place covered the course at wildly divergent speeds. Last week in Hitra, by contrast, 30th place was within seven-tenths of a percent of first at the finish. And the rollerski speed was by design far more uniform than the, shall we say, discrepant ski speeds apparent in that 50km. Again, these all feel like reasons why it is meaningful to compare athletes’ average HR to each other within the same race at Toppidrettsveka.
In conclusion, this doesn’t really fit anywhere else in this writeup, but Musgrave’s account of his day in fourth is hilarious and you should read it. The end.
Here’s Muzzy, who at 35 years old is well into elder statesman status on the World Cup circuit and knows it:
“Toppidrettsveka 52km classic. 4th. Big group into the high speed finish, so not being last in the group wasn’t actually too bad for an old, slow man😅 I think the big crash I heard behind me with 1km to go probably had something to do with this, but I’m just going to pretend that I was faster than everyone else (apart from ones that beat me, obviously). Luckily I just managed to beat Opstad Vike down the finishing straight. It would have damaged my pride a little bit, being out sprinted by someone with one pole (this happened once at Blink. I didn’t enjoy it).
“I got my pole broken twice during the race, which wasn’t ideal, but managed to not lose too much time and get back to the group pretty quickly. In the heat of the moment I may possibly have blamed Lars Heggen for breaking my 2nd one. After seeing the TV review though, it turns out I’m just a grumpy old man, and it had nothing to do with him😅 Hopefully he’s not scared of me now😬
“We almost couldn’t catch Torleif Syrstad at the end, even after he’d spent 2 hours off the front. If he’d gone an hour later — he’d have been unbeatable. But Torleif just loves going on his own off the front. If you ever go training with him, he spends the entire session 30m ahead of you, just to make a point that you’re going too slow for him. So he probably had a great time today, even if he didn’t win.”
race results | free race replay on NRK | my data set (including some graphs that didn’t make the final article; I thought that the tables were more helpful)
* N.b., I scrubbed two athletes from this data set: Iver Synstnes Hole, because his reported average HR of 111 for the race as a whole was such an outlier that I had doubts about its accuracy, and Ansgar Evensen, because his reported MHR of 217 ostensibly occurred on a downhill, which also gave me pause about the accuracy of his measurements. More broadly, all data here are clearly only as accurate as the recording devices used. I personally feel comfortable assuming that any pro skier posting to Strava would sooner ski naked than race without a chest strap (or: they would otherwise be naked, but they would be sure to nonetheless put on the chest strap), but that assumption may be incorrect. I had trouble making out HRM outlines on athletes’ torsos through the bibs used, so that is not dispositive either way. Peer-reviewed science this is not.
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