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Part
IV----------------------------------
Let’s move from the Why to
the How To...
And in contrast to the accepted method, let’s start
from the end. I have repeatedly stressed throughout this thread and the
preceding one (see link to it from Part I), that there is a huge
improvement in performance that can be made from purely aerobic training,
if you get it right. A huge improvement wayyy before any faster work is
done. In the example that follows I want to stress that what was achieved
was done without any of the sort of sessions that many of you might
expect.
So when you read what follows, just bear in mind that there
were no sessions of repeat 1,000s, no repeat miles, no "tempo" runs (at
least in the accepted sense of 10k-pace +15 secs). Just lots of controlled
aerobic training (detailed examples of the training will
follow)
All the figures and timelines that I will quote are genuine
and I want to use the example of my friend Giuseppe (whom I’ll refer to as
Joe, for the purposes of this thread).
A little over 5 years ago I
coached Joe to two 2.27 marathons. We had expected the second race (some 6
months after the first) to be sub-2.25, but raceday proved to be extremely
wild and windy and Joe ran his heart out and yet just broke his earlier
2.27 by a bare 2 seconds.
We would have ducked the race under
normal conditions and found another, but it was a fall marathon and we did
not have a fall-back. Life being what it is, there was no guarantee how
things would be if we waited till the following spring. Work, injury,
illness... anything could happen in four/five months. Joe made the
decision to race, and I admired him for doing so.
Some months after the
race I moved house, away from the area and we lost touch.
Early
last year my wife raced near Rome and Joe came across her after the finish
line and we all met up that evening for a meal and a chat about old times.
We had all enjoyed many long runs together all those years ago, so we had
much to recall and talked late into the night.
Joe ruefully
admitted that he had put on 20 pounds and was now approaching 35 years of
age. He was also mired in work, since he was the financial controller of
his family’s printing business and was having to hassle many clients for
lack of payment on time. A relaxed, easy-going guy, Joe admitted that the
stress of having to constantly argue with clients was getting to him and
serious training had long been forgotten. It was at least two years since
he had had any kind of fitness and now he was down to maybe 20 miles per
week, if that. And slow!?! (many of us could tell similar
stories).
Anyway, we parted after swapping email addresses and
telephone numbers. During the evening Joe had several times remarked that
his best running days were behind him, but my wife (older than him by a
few years) had admonished him every time, repeatedly telling him he was
talking nonsense. All he needed, she said, was to make the decision to
begin, and with the right training it would all come back.
A few
weeks after I got back home, I got an email from Joe saying that he was
going to go for one more serious marathon. We had got him hyped and he had
been able to think of little else. I told him before he began to look at
his working life and figure out how he was going to find 90 mins to 2hrs
per day for training. I also told him to ease his way (taking as long as
he liked) to get to 50mpw and then I would give him a written schedule
from there. (Examples of the schedules will follow).
One thing that
concerned him (and I) was how we would monitor his growing fitness without
jumping into regular races. Since he had worked with me in the past, he
knew all about lactate testing and HR training. After some thinking, I
told him we would be able to do the same, only without the blood tests. If
we were really careful, I said, and he kept me informed of everything, it
would work. He agreed to try. He argued with his brothers, telling them he
was going to alter his work hours to suit his training. Grudgingly, they
agreed.
Elsewhere, on another thread, I had explained why I liked
the period in lactate tests to be a minimum of 8 mins long. I have long
used a protocol that consists of repeat runs over 2400m at slowly
increasing intensities (with pauses after each period to draw blood).
(Note: you really should have followed and read the lactate link I put up
earlier to be able to fully understand the discussion from this point on.
Don’t worry, it’s not difficult and it's well worth the read).
Once
Joe got to 50mpw, I told him to perform the following mini-test (he knew
the protocol). Go to a track on a windless day, as rested as if for a
race, and do the following:
Run 2400m at a steady 140 HR (Stop 90 secs
and record time)
Run 2400m at a steady 150 HR (Stop 90 secs and record
time)
Run 2400m at a steady 160 HR (Stop 90 secs and record
time)
Run 2400m at a steady 170 HR (Stop 90 secs and record
time)
Run 2400m at a steady 180 HR (Stop 90 secs and record time)
At
all times, adjust the running pace to maintain a stable HR. On each new
stage slowly edge the HR up (ie: it is ok if the HR takes the first
600-800m to reach target level), then simply maintain HR. DO NOT start
fast and have to slow to maintain target HR.
Joe got back into
things in mid-April, and ramped to 50mpw of easy jogging pretty quick. I
got him to do the mini-test on 11 May and periodically thereafter (bearing
in mind the ~6 week period for mitochondrial growth). The numbers below
detail his progression in running speed at each date and each HR. The
times are in mins/mile. Joe’s oganised training began immediately after
the first test.
In 12 weeks ± Joe improved his HR vs running pace
at all intensities. A pace that required 150 HR initially, only required
140 HR a brief 12 weeks later. This was true across the board. A pace that
used to require 180 HR now required less than 170 HR...
Dates — 140
— 150 — 160 — 170 — 180
11May – 7.56 – 7.22 – 6.42 – 6.05 –
5.40
06Jun – 8.03 – 7.17 – 6.36 – 6.01 – 5.33
29Jun – 7.23 – 6.49 –
6.12 – 5.42 – 5.18
04Aug – 7.18 – 6.36 – 6.00 – 5.33 – 5.10
Six
weeks after this last test (and less than 20 weeks after beginning
organised training), Joe entered a marathon with instructions just to sit
quiet with the 2.20-low group and stop at halfway. He ran
71.xx.
Managing to finish less than 2 mins off his all-time half
marathon PR after only 20 weeks organised training, Joe began to see how
his sub-2.25 dream could still happen.
Discussion:
Before I get
into the exact details of Joe’s training, let me pre-empt one question you
might have: how was Joe able to run 5.33m/m with 170 HR when it used to
require 180 HR to run at 5.40m/m?
If you have read and understood
all that I have posted, you should have a good idea of why this occurs,
but let me just review it quickly.
A prime function of your heart is to
deliver oxygen to your active muscles. Your muscles then use this oxygen
combined with glycogen or fat to create energy to run. If your muscles are
inefficient at doing this, you will not get as much running energy per
unit of oxygen as you could.
Think of your heart as a pump that is told
what to do by the muscles. "We need more oxygen!" say the muscles and the
heart beats faster. "We have enough", they say and the heart rate stays
low.
To break one unit of glucose down into energy anaerobically
(WITHOUT oxygen) you get two units of energy (let’s say that you get 2
paces/strides up the road before you need more energy).
If you break
that self-same unit of glucose down into energy aerobically (WITH oxygen)
you get 36 paces up the road before you need more energy. Obviously this
is much better. So if you can make what used to be an anaerobic pace into
an aerobic pace, you are a much superior runner and can keep this pace up
for much further.
But even better, if you were so efficient that
you could break down one unit of fat into energy (instead of glucose) you
would get 460 paces up the road before needing more energy. And your HR
would be wayyyyy low at the same time.
Now 100% fat-burning isn’t going
to happen, but I hope you can understand that the higher a percentage of
fat there is (along with a percentage of glucose/glycogen) in the fuel mix
you burn at marathon race pace, the more comfortable you will be, the
longer you will keep up the pace, and the faster you will run.
The
short answer? Joe just got more efficient at using oxygen and breaking
glucose/fat down into energy for running.
To be
continued...
Addendum to
Part IV--------------
When Joe ran his first mini-test on 11
May, as well as emailing me the data, he also sent his opinions on the
effort levels involved at each stage. At the lower end, he remarked
that it was somewhat difficult to keep his HR low enough. This is
often the case at first. As can be seen, Joe was very slow initially
which showed how much aerobic fitness he had lost. The running pace
at this very low effort level improved in time with the training.
Most runners would skip this effort level and so lose the valuable
adaptations that take place.
At the higher end he found 170
to be a bit of work, and he said he would not like to have maintained the
180 HR effort for much longer. When pressed, he stated that he would
be lucky to keep the 5.40m/m pace up for 5km. Definitely not
further. This signifies, even without testing, that Joe had passed
his lactate threshold at this pace and was now building serious amounts of
lactate in his running muscles.
Less than 20 weeks later, Joe
would complete a HM (at 21km, a distance that was over four times longer
than the first mini-test) at faster than this 5.40m/m pace he had found so
tough (HM pace was 5.28m/m). He would be able to do this because,
through training, his lactate at this pace was now significantly lower
than it had been in his first test. Since this was so, the “effort”,
the degree of difficulty to him, the stress at this pace, was greatly
reduced and he had no problems maintaining this effort for 71+
mins.
I'm
probably going to have to refer to this in Part V, so this better go
here.
Second addendum to Part IV---------------
How
can we all move our Lactate Thresholds? Actually, the question is
not that simple, because for some of you it will be necessary to first
establish a threshold. Think back to the lactate charts I linked you
to in Part II (and here I wish I could post some charts to make this more
clear).
You’ve got the x and y axes, and the lactate curve
begins from the left and runs horizontal for a short way and then climbs
at 45 deg angle. For some of you, that would be exactly what we
would find if I lactate tested you; your anaerobic energy kicks in wayyy
too early, and you have no good relationship between your 1500m time and
your 10k / HM time.
Slightly better would be the next runner
whose lactate curve stays horizontal for slightly longer (remember, the
horizontal axis is running speed, so the further the curve goes to the
right before climbing, the better). At a slightly better running
pace, this athlete’s curve then climbs at 33 deg angle.
And,
of course, we have the well trained athlete whose curve stays flatter for
much longer before curving upwards.
We need to train to
become like the third athlete. If you have not already read and
fully understood the earlier lactate link, you might want to consider
drawing these 3 curves on a graph paper. Draw the x and y axes. You
can mark the vertical axis 1-10. Starting from about 2 on the vertical
axis, give the first athlete “A” about 2cm of horizontal line before
curving/slanting upwards at 45 deg all the way to 10. Starting from
about 1.5, give the second athlete “B” about 4cm of horizontal line before
climbing at 33 deg again all the way to 10. Finally, give the third
athlete “C” about 6cm+ of horizontal line before his slope climbs at an
even flatter angle to a max of 8.
Having done this, note that
if you draw any vertical line that crosses the horizontal axis anywhere on
the graph you can see how much lactate each athlete has to build to run at
the same pace as the other two athletes. Runner A’s lactate can be
crazy high, and runner B’s climbing, while runner C’s lactate is still at
calm levels.
How do we make runner A like runner B (and B
like C)? To move the lactate curve to the right, we need to go wayyy
back to just before the curve begins to turn, and train both at the point,
and below (slower). Not faster. If we do this right, in six
weeks the curve will move and we will be able to run faster, more easily
(ie: aerobically and not by calling up some anaerobic
energy).
Obviously, doing lactate tests, the effort levels at
which to train are easy to find. How can we find them without
lactate testing? That is what I will try to explain in Part
V.
Of course, almost every running book since Lydiard has
asked you to train this way, but they just say “run easy”, and it has been
my experience that very many runners get the definition of "easy” wrong.
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