SportTechie’s Sandbox is where we share our experiences testing products, gear, solutions and more in the sports tech space. Have something you want us to get our hands on? Pitch us at talkback@sporttechie.com.* * * * *Over the past decade, I’ve taken up distance running, usually covering 3-to-4 miles on local roads. So what did I do recently? I signed up for a 10K trail run whose website describes it as “a challenging course.” I’m not sure what was worse: extending myself by a couple miles — 10K is roughly 6.2 miles — or doing so on a trail with rugged terrain and steep inclines.My last competitive race, mind you, was a 300-meter hurdles as a high school senior more than 20 years ago. That’s a 0.3K, if you’re scoring at home.One of my closest confidants told me, “This seems, candidly, like a terrible idea”And that was before we had any idea of the weather forecast. After being 60 or 70 degrees most of the week, the temperature plummeted to 45 with significant rain in the hours leading up to the start. Just before firing the starting fun, a race organizer described this edition of the Raven Rocks Run as “definitely the rainiest and maybe the coldest.” Swell.But I like challenges, and I had recently been sent a trial pair of advanced trail running shoes, the Long Sky 2, created out of the Merrell Test Lab. TJ Graham, the head of performance at BreakAway Data, even sent me a Titan GPS unit and offered to analyze my post-race metrics.Given that this trail run was happening in the woodsy Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, Graham sent along some unsolicited running advice: “You don’t have to be faster than a bear. Just faster than the other people who might also be around the bear.” He then added, with no regard for the obvious dissonance, “Have fun!”In the month between race signup and the day itself, I had slowly increased my usual running distance. A week out, I ran 6.2 miles (albeit on roads) for peace of mind that I could complete the distance and, on another day, I scouted the county park course. It wasn’t marked for the race yet, so I made a few wrong turns, but one thing was nevertheless clear: the terrain was harder than I imagined. I had completed the primarily road-based 10K in 53:26. At the time, I set a goal of completing the trail 10K in an hour but, after seeing the course, I adjusted that goal to 1 hour, 5 minutes.As runners gathered near the start line in the hour before the start — a time for socializing and warming up that was interrupted by a downpour — I made small talk with a few veteran runners to learn any wisdom they might share. One tip stood out: the course narrows considerably so it’s helpful to start fast and avoid future bottlenecks. With that in mind, I took off through the opening meadow at a speedy clip. The data from my Titan — which triangulates from more satellite navigation systems (four) and at a higher sampling rate (25 hertz) than any other wearable — shows that I took this advice to heart. I ran the first 230 meters at about 12.5 mph, a very similar pace to my 200-meter sprint with the IMeasureU sensors last summer. In other words, I started way too hot.Actually, the data said I started even faster. I inadvertently turned on the Titan sensor before driving to the course, prompting Graham to muse that I might have been Batman or Superman because it logged speeds in excess of 30 mph in the car. Then again, somewhere early in the race, Graham overlaid my route and data on a satellite map and wondered about one instance when I was barely moving, musing, “So I don't know what you're doing in the middle of the woods at one mile an hour — is there even a trail in this space?”After the first half mile of grassy trail, we entered the woods, where we’d remain until the finish line. It was muddy. There were rocks and branches galore. I was very glad to have proper trail running shoes. The Merrell Long Sky 2 has a breathable mesh that dried quickly so the inevitable puddle plunge wouldn’t bother me all race. The Vibram Megagrip sole with chevron-shaped, five-millimeter lugs struck a nice compromise between protection from rocks and a good feel for the ground, so I didn’t slip or roll an ankle.“That's a little bit deeper than you would normally find on a lot of recreational trail shoes, and that seems to be the magic height,” Merrell VP of product management Shaun Bohnsack said of the 5 mm depth, noting that they are designed for moderate to rugged trails. “They tend to grip much better than other designs, and they're broad enough that they give us really great traction.”The whole Test Lab concept, he explains, is to center the athlete in the design process for a “‘build it, test it, break it, repeat’ type of methodology.” With the Long Sky 2, Ragna Debats, Denisa Dragomir and Georgia Tindley were the three pro trail runners who contributed most to the design.“I walk in I say, ‘It's got to be these things,’” Bohnsack said.” You talk to the athletes, and they go, ‘Does it? have you tried this way?’ And they bring new ideas. In the past, with our normal timelines of design, development and production, we don't really have time to test some of those crazier ideas. The lab gives us a longer lead time.”The real incline started by the third mile, cresting a hill to the race namesake Raven Rocks, which affords great views when it’s not cloudy and when you’re not struggling to keep moving to the end of a 10K. Following a descent, there’s an even steeper incline that, at times, came close to rock scramble territory more than running. My step cadence cratered from the mid-150s down to 117 for that fourth mile.The overall strain of the route was clear in comparing my Apple Watch data from the practice 10K I ran about 10 days prior to the race. In that one, I ascended 307 feet of elevation and maintained an average heart rate of 148. In the Raven Rocks Run, I climbed 1,060 feet with an average heart rate of 161.Titan computes an overall GPS load for each session, which tells a similar story with different methodology. It’s a metric that’s typically more useful for high impact sports, but it also helps explain the toll of an activity. My GPS load was 326, which Graham said is higher than what he often sees in games with the elite high school football wide receivers he coaches.“That is like your joystick. That is your Atari, moving around that field there. So wherever you move in those directions, it measures your GPS load,” Graham said. “It is your measure of how far directionally — up, down, left, right — you move. So football, you get a lot of weird measures. Are you just juking around? And that goes into you, right? Those are things are important too, because you can have a high top speed off the long distance, but the GPS load is important because, yeah, to be honest, that’s just the stuff that hurts.”For the last two miles, I paced myself behind a man wearing a backwards Ironman hat, figuring that I couldn’t be doing too poorly to be in the company of anyone who competed in one of those triathlons.As we ran up one final knoll, the finish line was in sight. A clock kept time and, lo and behold, it was very nearly my goal time of 1:05. I summoned my last bit of energy for a final push, crossing the line in 1:04:58. Two seconds to spare.In my postmortem review with Graham, he revealed that my final burst nearly matched my starting speed. My closing sprint came in at 11.9 mph.“I am saying those numbers are pretty much twins,” Graham said. “Clearly you sprint effortlessly, just by looking at the data. The fact that you're able to burst off the line and then ease into a nice steady flow and then also pick it back up at the end — your fast twitch muscles are firing.”This is where I should note that Graham is a natural coach, who participated in the NFL’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship last spring, spending two months with the Packers. (His father, not surprisingly, coached Olympic sprinters, and he played in the NFL so he’s been around a number of elite instructors.) He builds up my confidence, explains concepts in accessible language and personalizes the message. He’s offering this feedback pro bono yet asks me to send video of my sprinting technique, just because it interests him.“I like seeing this stuff, and then I like to see you in person. And then I like to see the video and that's how we're going to be better overall. And then even deeper than that is tailoring a workout program to fit everything you're looking for — that’s the full thing. That's the point of the analytics. Where our old school coaches were like, ‘Just run and hit a certain time.’ Time is cool, but how are you getting to that time? What are you doing? Is this sustainable? What does it look like? What are your actual goals of life?”Graham noted that my top running speed in between my starting and ending sprints was 9 mph, so that should be a target for future training. That equates to a 6:40 mile pace — much faster than I’m used to, but not beyond my limits.“Data is storytelling. These are just random numbers floating around, and we're like, what happened here? It's like reading The Matrix,” Graham said. “I've been watching The Matrix since I was 10, and I just figured out they were looking at code and getting a story. They were watching code, translating that quickly to visualize a story — this is how I feel.”In other words, I’m basically Neo.