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Scott Johnston
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If you have seen a 50% improvement in aerobic pace i 9 months that’s fantastic and you can probably expect to see more gains by keeping your Z2 volume high. I would suggest adding ME training. Your legs are sore after a big day in the mountains probably due to the down hill. You might benefit from doing step downs like I am demoing in this old video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqK5Xy00BjY. I’m not sure what sort of ME you are doing but I have never seen a mountain athlete of any kind (runner, skier, hiker, mountaineer) that didn’t benefit for using weighted uphill carries as described in this article https://evokeendurance.com/muscular-endurance-all-you-need-to-know/.
Scott
Matthew: Nose breathing is definitely NOT required for Z2 running. For many people, nose breathing is hard to pull off due to restrictions. While ‘ventilation’ is a great indicator of AeT it is best done in a lab using a gas exchange test.
dbroman: When you get over 2 hours you will likely see a more significant HR drift due to dehydration and an increase in core temp. So, I would not be too concerned over those drift numbers.
I hope this helps,
Scott
With these or anyone’s stock training plan we do not know who will be using it and their personal level. So we must start very conservatively. In your case you might want to jump to 10%BW. Be a ware that the fatigue may not show up until a couple of days after that training session. You can use the recommendation in our ME article as guidelines. https://evokeendurance.com/muscular-endurance-all-you-need-to-know/
Scott
Highpointer:
Great to hear from you and your journey to get to this point. It sounds like things are ticking along nicely with your training. That 24 week plan has gotten literally hundreds of folks up Denali. Stick with it and you should be fine from a fitness stand point. Be remember to keep honing your technical skills.
You might take some comfort in knowing that world renowned ortho surgeon Dick Steadman who performed 5 knee surgeries on me once told me that the ACL was over rated and that a significant portion of the NFL are playing football with compromised or missing ACLs. Dick would know because he worked on so many pro athletes and gave them back their careers.
Good Luck
Scott
Steve:
Nice to hear from a fellow XC skier. Yes I knew John Albert pretty well. He really understood training using the Norwegian method. I remember several long training discussions we had over a beer or two in West Yellowstone. Both of us being engineers could relate well. I was very sad to hear of his passing. He had a big influence in Sun Vally. TBK, what a character he was. My wife and were probably his first US friends when the USST hired him to coach the women’s team which in the mid 80s was based in Boulder, CO where we lived at the time. I trained a lot of hours with Torbjorn.
Anyway…On to your questions. Here is how I would make the most of the ME training to improve your XC skiing endurance. What you are doing now sounds perfect. Nice gradual progression in weight. I’m a little hazy on the duration end of things though. Is your hill 24 minutes long? You might consider doing 2 laps if so. Dump the water at the top and refill when you get to the bottom.
But as the fall progresses I would recommend shifting to a more XC ski specific ME workout. What you are doing has got you moving at too slow of a cadence. It is building good strength and ME fair very steep hills but we don’t have 40% grades in XC skiing. Especially on the Rendezvous course. I would find a 15-20% grade hill and using moose-hoof technique and no more that 10% of your body weight do weighted uphill intervals at a Z3sort of intensity feeling. Keep the reps long, like 8-10min and eventually accumulate up to 45min of this work. Start with something like 3x8min with either a full walk down recovery or if the hill is long enough you will get better effect from 2-3 min easy walking recovery between reps.
It sounds like you have a laid a great ME base but you need to turn this work into something a bit more specific to your goal event.
Good Luck
Scott
Danny:
More good questions on this topic. Let’s start with the first one you asked.
I’m doubtful it would be possible for one to maintain a lactate level of 4mMol/L for 50% of a marathon. I’m speculating here because there is a dearth of info on this topic. It might help us if we go back to first principles and examine what is happening metabolically to power the marathon. To run at around 5min/mile speeds takes a lot of glucose or a high glycolytic flux because glycolysis is a faster way of regenerating ATP than is fat metabolism. Remember that the main byproduct of glycolysis is pyruvate which if it hangs around in the cytosol converts to lactate. Both pyruvate and lactate are high-energy fuels if they can be taken into the mitochondria and oxidized. The bigger the aerobic capacity of the muscle fibers the more mitochondrial density and the greater capacity to take up that pyruvate and lactate and do something useful with it. So, while these faster marathoners are producing a lot of lactate it is not accumulating in the cytosol of the cells and blood lactate levels remain fairly low because they have huge aerobic capacity (the big vacuum I refer to in the books). Finding the balance of the fastest speed with the lowest lactate is the goal of any endurance racer in any distance race. That is why we use the types of workouts I mentioned before. It should be obvious that someone who can run 3x5km with a lactate level of around 2.5mMol/L is going to be able to sustain that pace for longer than someone producing 3mMol/L. Not running out of our quite limited glycogen stores before the final miles of a marathon is one of the biggest issues facing any marathoner.
Only someone who paced themselves perfectly would have the glycolytic reserves to run fast enough to produce more than 4mMol/L at the end of a marathon since glycogen stores will be very low. I think this would be especially true for the last 10% of the marathon since we could be talking 15 minutes for a 2:30 runner. Fifteen minutes at say 5-6mMol/L after running 23 miles at 5:15min/mile would seem to me to be superhuman. I once lactate tested some top skiers during a 3-hour Zone 2 workout where I asked them to finish with 5 minutes as hard as they could go. What I saw were lactate levels of 2 and below. The only explanation that I could think of was that their glycogen stores were so depleted that they could not produce higher speeds that would have produced higher lactates.
I sometimes employ a very challenging interval workout for both skiers and runners that will cause lactate levels to reach into the 5-8mMol/L range after the 5th and 10th repetition. To check their ability to sprint at the end of the 10th repetition I will have them do an 800m max effort immediately after we get the lactate reading from #10. When they are not yet in shape I will see low lactates and slow times for this 800 (their glycogen tank was nearly empty). As their fitness improves I see the 800 time drop and the lactate levels climb. This tells me that they can conserve glycogen at faster speeds by using more fat. This enables them to have a strong kick at the finish. A great demonstration of this in action was the finishing kick of Cole Hocker’s gold medal 1500 in the Paris Olympics this week. He had to have conserved his glycogen stores to pull that off.
I’m far from an expert on the marathon or physiology. I am working with what I have personally observed and the little understanding I have of metabolism. If you can find some conflicting information on lactate levels during marathon racing please share them here.
Your second question concerning heart rate: I say forget max HR or % of maxHR as they are not relevant to these discussions. What we do is to find the athlete’s individual aerobic and anaerobic thresholds through very simple testing explained here https://evokeendurance.com/our-latest-thinking-on-aerobic-assessment-for-the-mountain-athlete/
These tests will quite accurately and easily identify the athlete’s metabolic response to changes in intensity. If we correlate this to HR we have a reasonable way to prescribe and control training intensity. If you couple that with RPE you have a nice set of tools for controlling and monitoring intensity that will allow the athlete to learn and correlate HR to RPE under most conditions. One problem with RPE alone is that you have no way of connecting that to the underlying metabolism. So, you are just guessing about that all-important metabolic process that is fueling the work you are doing. The other more insidious problem of using RPE alone, especially for beginners with training is that they have no idea what “easy” feels like and tend to train too hard too often. This leads them into over-training. I have had even high-level ultra runners come to me quite overtrained because they relied on RPE alone. As with the above marathon lactate question it is, again, just my observation of hundreds of athletes over several decades.
I’m not sure I have adequately answered you but thanks for the interesting questions.
ScottThanks for the nice words. It is always good to hear that we are having an impact.
Sounds like you are thinking correctly about how best to structure your plan. One comment is to not get too wedded to the minutiae of the plan. Like don’t try to nail exact volumes or what you will be doing 8 Wednesdays from now. Doing so may lock you in to something that isn’t working, may impose unreasonable expectations on yourself and may inhibit the needed flexibility. I never plan concrete training for my athletes more than 2 weeks out and am open to changing the plan on short notice if the need arrises.
If your A race is more than 3-4 hours I would include Z2 training in the early base period. It is an intensity that is very specific to ultra racing and will provide a good base for the Z3-4 stuff. I like to do this during dedicated “tempo” session early min the build up. Like 20min in Z2 during a 1 hour run. As we get close to the event I will put 60min in Z2 during a 3-4 hours run.
You’ll still want to be doing the bulk of your aerobic base maintenance work in Z1. Just monitor fatigue and stay flexible.
Scott
Theodore:
This is such a good question it has really made me pause and think more about that statement I made. Here are a couple more data points. We coach two male ultra runners who also have decently fast marathon times: 2:16 and 2:18. We have done extensive paced training on tracks with both of them to help maintain the speed endurance they bring to ultras. A typical workout of this type (of which have done several) for each of them is to run 3x5km at a pace of 5:10-5:15min/mile (~3:12/km). This would be the pace they would run in order to achieve a 2:15 marathon. Between each 5km they stop for no more than 2min to check blood lactate levels. When they are in good racing form we see lactates of between 2-2.7 depending on the day, temps and wind. These low lactates are what tell us that they are prepared to race well. While this is not the same as stopping someone in the middle of a marathon to test lactate it is a good proxy for running at this intensity. This is similar to what I mentioned in my first reply about Canova controlling the intensity of his marathoners’ training with lactate since this level would be tolerable for the full 42km.
Thanks again for the challenge that made me re-evaluate my thinking.
Scott
Great question Theodore.
I think it might be a matter of semantics that is causing the disagreement. At issue is how we define the aerobic threshold.
When I have said the marathon is competed at or a little above one’s aerobic threshold I am basing that on lactate readings taken during training sessions at marathon pace. The elite marathoners that Renato Canova trained in the early 2000s were holding steady at around 2.5mMol/L of blood lactate concentration. While there are some differences between sources most place the aerobic threshold between 2 and 2.5mMol/L
Canova was very open in showing the data on his athletes. One in particular Moses Mosop ran a 2:03 so certainly in the speed realm of today’s top marathoners. I have run across this number in writings by other coaches of top marathoners and at least one study (but I will have to do some searching to find those sources).
It is entirely possible that your friend was able to have lactate levels in that same range at 89% of max HR. Here is why: Over the past 30 years I have personally tested and observed that in very well-endurance-trained athletes the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds separated by as little as 4%. An example is one 4 time Olympian Cross Country skier I coached whose aerobic threshold occurred at about 172bpm and his anaerobic threshold was about 182 and his max heart rate was 188. So, his AeT occurred at over 90% of his max HR and his AnT at over 95% of max HR. From a metabolic standpoint this athlete would be producing about 2.5mMol/L of lactate at his AeT but was able to produce over 18mMol/L during the finishing sprint of 15km race. These are the numbers I personally recorded. From a metabolic standpoint this indicates a huge aerobic capacity coupled with the big anaerobic capacity of a good 800m runner.
I don’t think the marathon has become shorter. It is still 42km and while the elite times have dropped from around 2:10 twenty years ago to 2:05 now, I can’t see how that would dramatically affect blood lactate levels. Lactate is after all a reflection of the glycolytic flux. Every marathoner must husband his/her carb burn rate so as to not run low in the final stages of the race and be forced to slow dramatically. This point you raised about the marathon getting faster so that it is now competed at a higher metabolic state than in the past got me thinking. I looked at the results of the New York City marathon over the past 30 years to see where a 2:30 (the speed of a top amateur male runner) would have placed someone. That time would have placed you 45th in 1990 and 52nd in 2023. In the years in between there is a good deal of scatter in the results but with a barely discernible upward trend. So, I don’t think we can say the marathon has gotten faster for the vast majority of runners. Only a tiny fraction of them are flirting with times faster than the historical winners.
In the end, I think the most important takeaway is that the marathon is an event competed at speed fueled almost entirely by the aerobic metabolic pathway and that training to improve the capacity of that system to produce ATP should be the goal.
Scott
Brandon:
I think Krizz has given you some good advice. With mountain running we can just track distance. 10km with 1ooom elevation gain and loss is going to take several times longer than 10m with 300m elevation gain/loss. It is best to distance and vertical. Use the time as a rough guideline.
I assume the 8400ft is gain and loss so you will end up where you started? If so the average grade is 10 32miles=169,000ft. 8400/169000= 5% but that is just if you only go uphill the whole way. If you go up 8400 and down 8400 the grade will have to be twice that 5%. I would focus on the vertical requirement and let the distance fall where it may.
Scott
I’m sorry to be slow responding since you are almost ready for your climb. In a word….REST.
You will not lose fitness in fact with the training you have been doing, more rest will help. We usually suggest for such a climb to taper for a week or more. No hard training, specific or general within a week. DO not do anything that makes you tired.
Good luck on your climb. Sounds amazing.
ScottGaz:
Great question. More aerobic volume is always going to help even if it’s not super specific. Especially if these activities help you avoid injury. We have coached some ship-bound athletes in the past and one thing we had them do was use the stairs/ladders on the ship to accumulate more aerobic vertical. On your rucking day, you might want to include some vertical under load.
Good luck,
ScottWhat you are experiencing is a common and unavoidable result of aging. Max HR drops with age and there is no training or secret sauce that changes or even slows that down. This DOES indeed act as a governor because your cardiac output is the product of the heart’s stroke volume (which usually declines with age as well but we can slow that decline) and the heart rate. Your maximum cardiac output is the amount of oxygen-carrying blood your heart can provide to your muscles. Clearly when the the maximum HR you can reach drops the maximum cardiac output is also going to drop. At 70 I am in the same boat. In my 20s and 30s, I used to race for 3 hours with a HR of 185. Now it takes a massive effort to hit even 160.
This unavoidable decline in cardiac output is why Maya has you so focused on improving the metabolism of your muscles. They still respond as they did when you were young.
Have a great trip to Shasta.
Scott
Thanks for the kind words!! Great question too.
Yes, the aerobic base training needs to be muscle-specific to be most effective. How do you build an aerobic base in the upper body musculature? Well, swimmers and cross-country skiers do it by a high volume of aerobic work with the arms/chest. That’s a big ask for most people though. Here is something you might try rather than doing thousands of pushups each day. I have used this with many military athletes who have to be able to do a high number of push-ups in 2 minutes. I put them in a Max Strength program with push-ups. Low volume but high resistance. They use weight vests and also weight plates on their backs. Doing sets of 5-4-3-2-1 with increasing weight from 85-100% of 1RM. They can know out 5060 in 2 minutes. IN your case you cold then rest in the pus-up plank between sets of 10-20. I think you could do this for sure.
Scott
Risto:
Great question. It was a problem of space in the book and what would be most helpful to most people. In my experience, most mountain runners and ski mountaineers don’t do ANY strength training. To suggest max strength training to people with minimal strength training background would, I thought be risky and irresponsible. So we focused on very basic exercises and Muscular Endurance.; Including a real strength training block can be useful for many mountain athletes. But a weak athlete will see good strength gains from doing an ME block even without a max strength block preceding it. If you choose to add this I recommend focusing on single-leg exercises like the Bulgarian Split Squat and Box Step Up rather than traditional lifts like deadlifts and squats.
I hope this helps,
Scott
