Your watch tracks pace, heart rate, sleep and load. It can't tell you what your body is running on. Here's the data most runners never look at.
Pace. Heart rate. HRV. Sleep score. Cadence. Training load. Most runners can tell you their resting heart rate from last Tuesday. Ask them their ferritin and you usually get a blank look.
That gap matters. Your watch is very good at measuring what your body does. It has no way of measuring what your body is running on.
Wearables are built to track output. They will happily tell you that your easy run cost more heartbeats than usual, or that your HRV has dropped three days in a row.
What they can't tell you is why. A higher heart rate at easy pace can come from poor sleep, heat, a cold coming on, too much load, or low iron stores. On the screen, they all look the same. The cause is in your blood.
Ferritin. This is your stored iron. Iron helps carry oxygen to working muscles, so when stores run low the same pace costs more effort. The Australian Institute of Sport uses a ferritin below 35 µg/L as a marker of iron deficiency in athletes, and research suggests it affects roughly 15 to 35 per cent of female athletes and 5 to 11 per cent of male athletes.
Vitamin D. Plenty of Australian runners train before sunrise or after dark and work indoors in between. Vitamin D plays a role in bone health and muscle function, and you can't tell where yours sits by how you feel.
Inflammation (hs-CRP). A rough read on how much stress your body is carrying. A big session pushes it up for a day or two. If it's still high when you're rested, that's worth knowing.
Most runners only get bloods when something has already gone wrong. By then you're comparing a bad result against nothing.
A test when you feel good gives you a baseline. When your running goes flat three months later, you have something real to compare against instead of guessing.
You wouldn't train for a marathon without a watch. A blood test once or twice a year sits alongside the data you already collect and fills in the part your wearable can't reach.
Superrun panels are built around the markers that matter for runners. Your results land in a private dashboard, and your Superrun report scores each body system against our Superrun zones, so you know what to work on.
This article is general information for runners and is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a treatment plan. Always discuss your results and any health concerns with your GP or a qualified health professional.
Superrun is blood testing built for runners. Start with RunCheck: iron, ferritin, inflammation and a full blood count for $129. No GP referral needed, with 4,000+ collection centres across Australia.
Want the full picture? See the RunBase panel, $299
