Here is Craig's Analysis:
Mike,
To calculate LT, we use the pace from the entire 30 minutes and your average HR for the last 20 minutes. The reason for this is it sometimes takes a few minutes for your HR to climb up to the threshold, so we allow a 10 min buffer where your HR may be lower. We want the higher (generally) number that you get from the final 20 minutes. I say that's generally higher because there are times where the first 10 min will have a higher HR than the next 20. I'm a good example of that. When I did this test, my 10 min HR was 180, but the 20 min rate was 179. That's close, but still lower. Interestingly, my 20 min pace was 15 seconds faster than the 10 min pace, even though my HR was lower.
Anyway, for you, let's use an LT HR of 165 and pace of 6:42. Because you were so consistent today, we have pretty good number for pace. HR might really be 164, but we'll do 165 for now. It's close enough that it won't make too much of a difference.
When you look at the spreadsheet, sometimes you have to adjust the math a little where the zones overlap. I've done that for you here. You'll sometimes get the same number for the high of one zone and low of another. Or sometimes there are two beats between zones. I just round up the high and make the low of the next zone one more beat than the previous zone's high. Here's what we have for you.
Zones – LT HR 165
LOW | HIGH | |
ZONE 1 | 100 | 140 |
ZONE 2 | 141 | 148 |
ZONE 3 | 149 | 156 |
ZONE 4 | 157 | 164 |
ZONE 5a | 165 | 169 |
ZONE 5b | 170 | 175 |
ZONE 5c | 176 |
Paces — LT Pace 6:42
SLOWEST | FASTEST | |
ZONE 1 | 08:38.6 | |
ZONE 2 | 07:38.3 | 08:34.6 |
ZONE 3 | 07:06.1 | 07:34.3 |
ZONE 4 | 06:38.0 | 07:02.1 |
ZONE 5a | 06:29.9 | 06:42.0 |
ZONE 5b | 06:01.8 | 06:25.9 |
ZONE 5c | 06:01.8 |
So what's this mean?
It means when you are doing zone training, you want to keep your HR average for each mile within the range for the targeted zone. At the start of a training season (like right now), you spend about 6-8 weeks doing base building. 90% of all your runs during this time should be done in zone 1. So for you, you'll want to keep your HR at 140 or below mile after mile. The "pace" chart is a little more nebulous. It's really a guideline, rather than a rule. What the pace chart mean is, in general, when you are in zone 1, you'll be running 8:38 or slower. Zone 2, you'll run between 7:38-8:34. As you know, there are A LOT of variables that determine your pace for a particular day. With perfect weather and being well rested, you may find you are running 8:15 or faster and still have your HR below 140. That's perfectly OK. HR is the driver; pace is just a predicted range. Always run your HR, regardless what pace that works out to be. Many times it will be faster than what the chart predicts. If you are tired, sick, hot, etc, you may find yourself struggling to hold a 9:00 pace while keeping your HR at 140. That's OK too. Just run HR; it NEVER lies.
So why do you care?
You've probably read and heard a lot about VO2max. This is maximum volume of oxygen the body can deliver to working muscles per minute. It's a great measure of how "efficient" your body is working. Many people mistake VO2max as the holy grail measure of how fit you are. But although VO2max IS a clear measure of fitness, it's a poor measure of performance. By itself, knowing your VO2max will do little to help you in your training. If you line up a bunch of elite athletes and only have their VO2max number as a data point, it would be impossible to predict the winner.
This is where the LT comes into the picture. Lactate threshold is defined as the intensity of exercise at which lactate begins to accumulate in the blood at a faster rate than it can be removed. This is problematic because as a result, unbuffered acid is added to the blood, a condition that makes you feel like you have to vomit and stop right away. With knowledge of your LT, you can fairly accurately predict your finish time for any given race because you know exactly what your body is capable of sustaining before your heart and brain shut you down. With the information you gave me today, I can predict if you were to run Too Cold this weekend, the perfect race for you would be to target 156 HR putting you at about a 7:05 pace. You'd finish in 1:06. Of course, there are factors that could skew that a little, but it would really close.
That's all well and good, but our goal is more than understanding where we are; we want to get faster. Well you know one key piece to that puzzle. MILES ARE KING! If you run more miles, you WILL get faster. But here's the thing… When you start running 50, 60… 80 miles a week, you are putting A LOT of stress on your body. And in order to get the most benefit from your next workout, you need to be fully recovered from the last. Your HR is your barometer. If you are not fully recovered, your HR will be elevated. Slow down and stay in your zones so you don't do more damage. Once you start training in an unrecovered state, a snowball effect takes over and you are essentially logging junk miles.
GAINS ARE MADE DURING RECOVERY NOT TRAINING!
That last sentence is something people rarely understand. People think if they kill it on a training run they'll get stronger. But the truth is training runs make you weaker by destroying muscle fibers. Your strength comes from these fibers rebuilding themselves shorter and stronger than they were before. If this process is not complete when you go out and do another hard run, you just wasted the benefit of the earlier session. Much like with children where growth occurs at night when they are asleep, runners get stronger and faster when resting and recovering.
Build a better engine.
So we know we want to run more miles, and we know we want to be recovered between sessions. What else can we do to get faster? Well, just like your internet connection will be faster if you increase your bandwidth pipe, you will run faster, if you can increase the blood flow to your muscles. There are three ways to do this. The first is obvious. Run faster. When you do, your HR increases and blood is pumped faster. The problem with this is we want our HR lower, not faster, because the faster your HR is, the quicker you are to tire. So how can we deliver more blood to our muscles without increasing our HR. The answer is we increase the size of our heart and increase the stroke volume of blood pumped through it. These two items combined are what give that elite athlete the ability to go on an "easy" 7:00 run with you and keep their HR down in zone 1 (for them), while you are struggling to keep up because you are in zone 4.
The irony here is the only way to increase the size of your heart so you can run faster is to run slower. Weird, huh? But it's true. When you run in zone 2 or above, your heart is working in a capacity to keep up with demand. When you run in zone 1, though, your heart has some extra time on its hands. If you could hear your heart thinking, it might sound like "Huh, this guy keeps running and asking me to deliver more blood. I'm really built for walking, and I think he might do this running thing again. I think I'll do some upgrades." So your heart starts expanding and increasing its capacity to deliver blood more efficiently. This is also one of the reasons your resting HR plummets as you get more fit. As stroke volume increases, you simply don't need as many pumps to get what you need. That's all really good stuff, but the only way to do it is to run in zone 1.
So… Use your zones. Every run should have a purpose. The bulk of your early season miles should be base building, heart expanding, stroke volume increasing zone 1 miles. Each week, you might sprinkle in one tempo zone 2 (or really low zone 3) workout, but everything else should be zone 1. Then when you are about eight weeks from your race, you start running a little more in zones 2 and 3. Marathon pace is in zone 3 for most people. If you look at the chart, you'll see the predicted paces for your zone 3. You goal marathon pace is at the slower end of zone 3. That's great! It means you are more likely to actually achieve your goal. When you start that tuning phase eight weeks out, you will add longer stretches of zone 2 and 3 to your long run. You still have that tempo each week, and everything else… Still zone 1. Finally, about four or five weeks out, you start sharpening (speed work). This is when you get serious on the track and push into zones 4 and 5. These workouts are short in duration because you are really tearing up your body and still have that requirement of being fully recovered before the next workout. Luckily, if you back off your zone 1 max 5-10 bpm, you can benefit from Active Recovery, meaning you are running and recovering at the same time. You get the best of both worlds if you are disciplined enough to slow down and do it.
I know all of this is a lot to digest. It's hard to slow down. And it's counter-intuitive to think you can get faster while running slower. Elite athletes will tell you, though, that 99% of people run their easy runs to fast and their fast runs to slow. There is a time for running fast; it's in the sharpening phase. But you CAN NOT build capacity/endurance and speed at the same time. Speed is easy to get. That's why the phase is so short and close to your goal race. The rest of your training should be focused on upgrading that engine so when the time comes to ask it to work at full capacity, you are have more to work with.
When people say they just don't get it, my challenge is to just try it for one season. You're only investing one marathon season, 16-20 weeks. I've never heard anyone who gave it an honest shot report they didn't have the best season of their career. For most, once you start training this way, you think it's ridiculous to train any other way. Especially as we get older, our heart is an ideal governor of effort. We're getting too old to simply muscle through. At some point, injury or worse (eg: heart attack) will happen. Your heart will not lie to you or steer you wrong. Listen to it, and I promise you'll be rewarded. Good Luck! I'm happy to answer any questions.
Craig
ps: I'm currently reading a pretty good book on all of this. As with most books, I don't subscribe to 100% of what the author says, but for the most part, it's inline with what I've learned elsewhere. The author is a well know triathlete coach who's been doing sport science for 40 years. It's an easy read and does a good job of explaining when, why and how to use each zone.
Total Heart Rate Training: Customize and Maximize Your Workout Using a Heart Rate Monitor
Joe Friel
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