[andrewmorris]

Hey, Scott.

Thanks for the response.

I have done the AnT test twice on the exact same course, which has a grade of 8.8% and got 174 and then 172. I have done a 3rd test on a course with an 11.4% grade and got a similar number: 174. But your line of thinking has me wondering if I may be limiting the AnT test by muscular endurance. While I do plenty of general strength training, I haven’t done much of any ME work and I haven’t been doing hill sprints or Z3 workouts recently. There were times during this test that I had to walk–not because of my breathing–but because of fatigue in my legs.

To the second part, when I did my most recent AeT test back in March, I initially tried to run all of my runs at the top of Z2 in that 165-168 range. I quickly found that I was getting beat up by that and ended up inserting a rest week and repeating the previous training week. After that, I decided to relax my pace and allow myself to complete my runs around the bottom of Z2 or even in Z1 (in the 136-159 range) and haven’t had any issues since.

If I understand what you’re saying, if I could run at 165-168 day-in and day-out then 172 is probably not my AnT because if my AnT was 172 then 168 would be far to fatiguing.

Putting all of this together, I am wondering if I would benefit from some ME work or Z3 intervals to gain enough muscular endurance to get a more accurate (and probably higher) AnT result. And in the meantime, keep the rest of my runs at least 5% below that 168 AeT threshold so stay below about 159.