Three Data Visualisations from an adventure in the Alps
Back in June I hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB). The TMB is a ~170km hike up and down (and up and down and up and down..) the stunning mountains of the Alps and stretches across France, Italy and Switzerland. Having never completed a multi-day hike before, this was a huge physical and mental challenge and overall took just under eight days.
Once I’d completed the hike and found myself back in the valleys, I found myself wondering how hard my body had really worked during the last week, and on which days it had worked the hardest. Fortunately, I’d been wearing my Garmin for the entire trip, and had plenty of data accumulated — time to do some data visualisation!
(I’ll be doing a more detailed blog on the process of collecting and cleaning the data soon — stay tuned!)
1. Heart Rate Zones Analysis
Heart Rate (HR) zones are a great way to analyse the amount of effort you’re putting into an activity at any given time. The zones range from 1 (easy walking pace) right up to 5 (all-out sprinting)*.
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After plotting the seconds spend in each HR zone for each day (note — I’ve only included the time hiking; resting, sleeping etc is not included)
On the surface, it seems as though days 3 and 6 were the toughest days — they were certainly the longest, and seem to have the most time in the green zone, but was I working as hard per day compared to the other days?
2. Daily Average Heart Rate
To dig into the data a little deeper, I plotted the average HR for each day to see which days overall were hardest.
From the graph, we can see in fact that the highest days are day 1 (140 bpm) and day 5 (133 bpm). Despite day 3 being the longest day, it actually wasn’t the most difficult. So what could have caused the HR to spike on days 1 and 5?
3. Daily Elevation Gain vs Average Heart Rate
One of the main impacts on your effort on this trek is the elevation; whichever of the many variants you take, you can’t avoid the huge climbs. So the next step was to plot these against each other and assess — was the elevation higher on days with more climbing?
The trends from the graph seemed to at least visually confirm this idea — the more elevation, the higher the overall HR.
Overall, the TMB was a fantastic hike, and I certainly worked hard in completing it — I hope my analysis of the trek was interesting!
Thanks for reading 😊
*there’s more info on HR zones on the Garmin website
