Friday, July 22, 2005
Science
Allen asked a couple of questions the other day one of which focused on fatigue. I always thought fatigue was like pornography, hard to define but you know it when you see it. It turns out that there is at least some objective criteria behind it invovling lactate levels. Note that this is totally unrelated to the lactation room down the hall.
I think this is the simplest of the 3 sites (link) basically saying that your threshold is probably around 85% of max heart rate and to improve it you should run at that level (but not over) on some 'tempo' or 'cruise' runs. Note that the durations they give are for experienced runners and would wipe out one of us beginners. A nice tempo run for us would be 5-7 minutes at 65-70%, 10-15 at 85% followed by 5-7 at 65-70%. A cruise would be a bunch of 3-5 min. runs at 85% with maybe 1-2 mins at 65-70% in between. I think you would need to get 5-7 cruise periods in the run to make it beneficial.
This site (link) has a good overview of what its about and what to do with it. If you don't know your 5K pace you can either go run 3 miles and find the time or take some guess that you could do it at like 10:30 to 11:00 minute miles and add from there. The way I used this calc was to find my time, add the number, run that pace for 20 minutes and see what my heart rate was.
This link (link) is pretty intense (remember Krebs cycles from Bio 1,000 years ago?) but if you make it through
I think this is the simplest of the 3 sites (link) basically saying that your threshold is probably around 85% of max heart rate and to improve it you should run at that level (but not over) on some 'tempo' or 'cruise' runs. Note that the durations they give are for experienced runners and would wipe out one of us beginners. A nice tempo run for us would be 5-7 minutes at 65-70%, 10-15 at 85% followed by 5-7 at 65-70%. A cruise would be a bunch of 3-5 min. runs at 85% with maybe 1-2 mins at 65-70% in between. I think you would need to get 5-7 cruise periods in the run to make it beneficial.
This site (link) has a good overview of what its about and what to do with it. If you don't know your 5K pace you can either go run 3 miles and find the time or take some guess that you could do it at like 10:30 to 11:00 minute miles and add from there. The way I used this calc was to find my time, add the number, run that pace for 20 minutes and see what my heart rate was.
This link (link) is pretty intense (remember Krebs cycles from Bio 1,000 years ago?) but if you make it through
