Athlete Login
Forum Archives
📣 Our community has moved!
After several years of incredible discussions, we've moved our community to a new home on Reddit where we can better serve our growing family of mountain and endurance athletes.
Join us at our new subreddit forum /r/evokeendurance for:
- Training advice from our coaching team
- Peer support and motivation
- Gear discussions and recommendations
- Trip reports and inspiration
This forum will remain archived so you can still access all the valuable content and conversations from over the years. However, all new discussions and coaching support now happen on Reddit.
Join us on Reddit
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Thought I’d follow up in case it is helpful for anyone who finds this.
I spent the last ~3-4 weeks of training doing weekly hill sprint and uphill ME intervals running on a 30-40% grade. Today, I re-did my lactate threshold test and was really pleased with the results. I was able to maintain a running pace on a ~9% grade for the full test and didn’t feel like I was slowed down by heavy legs. I ended up with an average HR of 180 bpm for the duration of the test (up from 172 four weeks ago). with an AnT of 180 and a AeT of 168, I feel like that’s a much more reasonable spread of ~7%.
Thanks, Scott!
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.
