[Andrew Bollard]

@balfer:

I guess the first question woiuld be: what are your training goals? You sound like you’re just generally trying to improve your aerobic endurance at the moment, but given that most folks are here for mountain sports training advice please correct me if I’m wrong. This will inform the training modalities that are best suited to your goals.

How did the lactate/heart rate figures correspond to your breathing? Did you feel like you were at a conversational, nose-breathing pace throughout, or was your breathing laboured and “mouthy” at e.g. 135 BPM?

The way to cure ADS is to spend a lot of time training at your Aerobic Threshold, slowly building up your weekly volume over several months to whatever is the most you can sustain. Although this will be frustratingly slow in the beginning and it’ll be a long time before you can run or hike and keep your heart rate below your AeT, the good news is that you can make very appreciable gains in the next 6 months if you’re consistent. The higher the weekly volume, the better; 10 hours a week training at AeT will yield much faster results than 4, but of course this is subject to how much free time you have to train.

It’s probably advisable to do a heart rate drift test to give yourself another baseline to work from in addition to lactate testing. I’m not clear from your post if you’ve seen Scott’s latest articles on this site discussing ADS; if not, have a look this article for reference on how to do a heart rate drift test. This article explains what the different heart rate zones are, and this article specifically deals with ADS and how to know when you’ve been “cured”.

Hope this is helpful and fire away with more questions if you have them.