Andrew Coggan wrote:
I said *nearly* gale force, not gale force.
Since you brought up an exact value of 2 m/s, though, let me be a bit more specific:
Even a wind speed of 5 on the Beaufort scale (which on open terrain - an airport taxiway, for example - would correspond to a ground level wind speed of ~2.5 m/s) would only alter the energy requirement of running by a few percent.
This conclusion is based in part on studies in which the oxygen uptake of runners has been measured while they ran on a treadmill placed in a wind tunnel.
"In God we trust. Everyone else must bring data." - W. Edwards Deming
A few percent is huge though. Let's just go for 2%. 2% of 180 minutes (3 hr marathon) would be roughly 4 minutes. While 4 minutes might not mean much for someone who's less experienced, 4 minutes for someone who has trained specifically for a race at a certain pace means either they need to really be able to run a 256 to break 3 hours or they need to adjust to a 304 to keep the same effort as 3 hours. If it's actually a 3%+ difference, it's even worse.
Look, I'm not disagreeing that the stryd pod can calculate a given power for certain cases. What I'm saying is that the power number for running isn't nearly as useful as a metric as it is for cycling. Things like elevation, wind, muscle fatigue, form breakdown, etc all play factors that a power number from stryd can't account for.
A promise if you had a stryd pod on some elite runners that their power usage at mile 22 is significantly higher than at mile 2 as their form breaks down. That doesn't mean they should slow down though to maintain a certain power number. For them, all that matters is pace and where their competition is. No different than a runner trying to hit a PR