[dannypapes]

Thanks for this, Scott. Sorry to eat up your time with an relatively obscure line of questioning. I don’t disagree with anything you said, and think that you described the marathon metabolism picture excellently. This is a little academic and doesn’t really affect a training plan or philosophy.

I’m a rower by trade and my framing of endurance and intensity is naturally going to be different from those who coach and study efforts like the marathon, despite both being solidly categorized as endurance sports. I’m not sure how many marathoners finish with lactate above 15, but I have seen that result rowing quite a few times so I think I was viewing 4mmol as relatively low intensity and not seeing that full metabolic picture. Thanks again.

[dannypapes]

Hey Scott,

This is fascinating, thanks for the level of detail. This brings up two questions for me.

1: You say that AeT is 2-2.5. Do you think that 3 sets of 5km actually give a coach a good estimate of where a runner will be for the majority of a 42k race? Seems to me that if someone is pushing 2.7 after 5km (reliably above AeT) you would expect them to be above 3.0 and probably pushing towards 4.0 (stand in for AnT) for a significant portion (>50%) of the race. And those runners are almost certainly spending something like the last 10% of the race well above 4.0.

My second question is a bit off-topic but brought up by the data in this. You’re describing a huge mismatch in HR and lactate. Does this give you pause in leaning so heavily on heart rate in training? If you have athletes that can be at 90% of Max HR and still safely at or below AeT, it seems to me that RPE would be way more reliable than HR or HRR. Maybe this phenomenon is only present in elites? Though in untrained people I think you can see very high heart rates (90%+) that don’t seem to be accompanied by a similarly high lactate level. Thanks for any thoughts.

[Author]

Posts