Total decline

Numbers don't lie...

I have been implementing threshold training in a quite disciplined way during winter. However, the values I have based my training on were from a test I took in August 2014, so I wasn't entirely sure that I was actually training at correct intensity. This week I took a new test and got my lactate threshold and VO2-max values measured. Unfortunately, all values had gone down since 2014.

Good news first. Among the values that had gone down were also weight and fat percentage! :-) 2 kg lighter and 5 points less percent body fat compared to 2014, on the very same scale. My VO2-max had not changed much, around 52, which is still better than that of 99.5% of women my age, and better than even that of 96% of 20 year-old women. And the best news of all is of course Dag Hilland, the conductor of the test. It was so nice to see him again, get loads of information, motivation and advice. No matter how the results come out, the test itself is an incredibly rewarding experience, thanks to Dag. Both Dag himself, and not the least his wife Rebecca, have improved their forms impressively during the last few years, and Dag says it is all due to very disciplined threshold and zone 1 training. So I have been doing the right thing, but with a little too high HR than I needed to.

Not so good news. My heart rate zones are now quite a bit lower than what I thought. My zone 1 is really slow, and my threshold heart rate is about 7 heart beats lower than before. This corresponds to about 0.2 km/h slower speed at this HR. Recall that threshold HR is the point where your body starts producing so much lactic acid that you cannot keep going more than about an hour at that level. So this will have quite a bit to say for my half marathon time. Interestingly, the speeds that I can keep at various heart beats are still the same as before, but my body starts producing lactic acid earlier now than before.

To be honest, I was expecting this. But perhaps still hoping for better results. At the end of 2014 I was in really good shape, and then almost the whole of 2015 was characterized by injuries. Although I did a lot of uphill training and had a new record at Stoltzekleiven in 2015, there was almost no running, so my running form must have declined quite a lot during that time. Then in 2016 there was a lot of running but without paying attention to HR zones at all. It would have been nice to know where I was just before Amsterdam Marathon in October 2016. After that I lost a lot of form, and it is first recently that I started to feel some improvement again.

On the positive side. No matter what, it is good to know the real values and train accordingly in a dedicated way. Anyway my recurring injury in the hamstrings does not really make fast running much fun these days, so the slower zones fit me much better now. My new threshold zone is actually what I thought was my sweet spot, and it is quite pleasant to run in that zone, even for pretty long intervals or tempo runs (up to 10k). My new zone 1 is so slow that I can do it even when hamstrings and legs are complaining, and I can transfer some of my zone 1 training to biking and swimming, making sure to have even lower (10-15 heart beats) lower HR then. So in a sense, the new values will make my training easier and even more pleasant than before.

Boosted dedication. I have been reading everything I come across about threshold training, but there has not been a very clear single advice. I have been applying what Ingrid Kristiansen advises: never above threshold during training, only at competition. Dag's advice is very in line with this. Never ever train above threshold, not even during short intervals or uphills. The advice was very clear: a lot of zone 1 training, as much as you can get done. Then 2-3 times a week, training at threshold, either in form of intervals or a not too long tempo run. I must admit that although I was very careful about not exceeding (what I thought was) my threshold, I had not been doing much zone 1. My runs outside of threshold intervals were somewhere in between, and I have now adjusted all those down to zone 1.

Why threshold and zone 1 training.  Dag and Ingrid say that training at threshold has the same effect on your form as training at maximum heart rate. You train your heart to be stronger by pushing its current limits. If you instead train at maximum intensity, then the impact on your form will be the same, but you will wear down your body much more and accumulate a lot of lactic acid. You will need much more time for recovery so your total training volume will decrease. Keeping your intensive training to 2-3 threshold sessions a week allows you to train every day, as long as all your other sessions are in zone 1. Zone 1 training seems to do wonderful stuff to your body, your cells, your blood vessels, and your mitochondria (some tiny stuff in your cells that convert calories to energy). It also helps to keep you out of injury.

So I now have a clear recipe to follow and a lot of renewed motivation. But things are unfortunately still not so straight forward. My legs won't let me run as much as I want these days, so I have to resort to swimming and biking. I have no idea how this will impact my running form, but in any case I need this kind of triathlon training. I have also started seeing my physiotherapist Ane the angel again. Within my body's limits, I think I am doing everything I can.

The rest, I leave in the hands of the universe ;-)