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Max Krause
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Hi Luka, I’m just a lurker on this forum but there’s a good explanation on pickups here: https://evokeendurance.com/why-even-ultra-runners-need-speed-work/
These are a type of speedwork more for strength rather than endurance adaptations so yes 10 seconds is correct. The heartrate is allowed to go up for that and maybe the minute after given the delayed response of heart rate. But otherwise all at/below AeT.
I won’t speak to the drift test but I have some experience getting into running. When starting running the main worry isn’t lack of fitness but lack of leg strength leading to injury. So even if you are quite fit (or especially if you’re quite fit!) you’d want to start with run walking. I personally didn’t use this but some friends have had success using the couch to 5k program when getting into running or recovering from injury.
As for fitness my personal experience is that at the start it’s easy to improve. In retrospect I trained really poorly when I got into running from hiking a couple years ago (way over AeT all the time) but at that stage of fitness it’s so easy to improve that it didn’t matter. So my advice would be do the couch to 5k to build your legs and then redo the drift test as your AeT will probably have made a jump. And then you can decide whether to stick with run walking or go to consistent running.
Hi, I’m not the expert here and someone else may have much more perspective.
I think it may be a good idea to not think of just adding more sessions to make progress. You can only handle so much work. So even if you have free time to fill just adding more work isn’t going to lead to progress.
If you think you’ll get a benefit from doing speed work but your legs are always tired then you may want to replace one or two sessions with the speedwork. And I personally definitely wouldn’t do it on my long runs, they have enough impact by themselves.
Thank you Josh, that makes sense. I think so often periodization is talked about in the context of preparing for a race/event which made me unsure whether the time spent in the capacity phase is limited by the possible gains or simply by the time available to the event.
Thanks for the suggestion on hill sprints Josh. I suspect where I live that might draw a volume of funny looks that I could not handle :D.
The Z3 thing I’m wondering is more a theoretical question of whether you can infinitely build capacity (via ME) if you have no goal (race) at all. Or is it more of a staircase of building performance where each step requires building capacity, then cashing in with specific training before moving on to the next step?
Thank you very much Scott, that is really helpful.
Great suggestion with the sleds! I had tried hill sprints on steps but found I could never get the balance of taking too few or too many stair steps per step right- at least on the steps I had available.
I trust your suggestions will work but I am curious of the theory behind switching up sprints/ME blocks with Z3 blocks. If my only goal is to get stronger long term and not have whimpy legs on my long runs why not just do sprints/ME? Z3 is fun though so I’d probably do a block anyway :).
Hello, this is a real interesting topic and I wonder how it might apply to my situation. I mostly go “running” up the Scottish mountains. Usually all the uphill through roughness/steepness is walking and only the downhill is running.
During the week I mostly run in Glasgow which has some rolling hills but nothing more. On Tuesdays I can do a few laps up the mini mountain in the middle of Edinburgh from my office.
Is this enough specific work for what I really want to do during the week or would incorporating the stairmaster be beneficial?
