Started with 5 km warm-up in the park, then over to the track for the first workout of the month. It has been so long since I did a full-on interval session. And this particular session, 6 x 1000 m, well, the last one was before the Great Hard Disk Crash of May 2005. So I was looking for some data to compare with tonight, but there are none except way back in mid-2004. All I can say is that generally, before abandoning intervals for aerobic training, I used to run these sessions at about 3:38 to 3:42/km pace. So, tonight's times? Here we are:
Rep 1 0:03:35
Rep 2 0:03:31
Rep 3 0:03:31
Rep 4 0:03:32
Rep 5 0:03:32
Rep 6 0:03:23
I was pretty happy with that. On that last one I sprinted home the last 200 m of the last rep and am confident I hit heart rate max: 184! So that's it from now on, 184. I did run these pretty hard, but aerobically it felt OK for the first four, even though my heart rate got up to about 95% for most reps (100% on the last). Legs got fatigued towards the end. But look, the important thing is this: my interval times, or VO2 max, or top end speed, or whatever you want to call it, has definitely increased. Increased significantly. And how much speed training have I done to bring it about? Not much, that's how much. Aerobic training works. That's all there is to it.
Hope you like the photo of me taken at the Hokkaido festival near Yoyogi Park a couple of weeks back. It was a really nice little festival. I bought this whole salmon for the family. Took him home and cut him up. Mika emailed me the photo today, thus the lack of chronologicality...
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4 comments:
Forgot to clarify for non-japanese speaking readers: "hisashiburi" means "it's been a long time (since we have seen each other)"
That session sounded much better than a smack in the face with a wet salmon :-)
Pretty solid improvement - My theory is find what works for you (and it looks like you have) and do it! We are all different.
Nice jacket BTW ;-)
Great photo!
2p Id rather the salmon... my heart would explode at 3:20 pace haha
Stephen how is aerobic training different to speed work... is it not getting the hear rate up as well? Sorry if it is a stupid question -we musn't have covered that in the alleged secret training camp :-)
Thanks guys. Kit, aerobic training is different in that you don't run at as high a percentage of your maximum heart rate as you do when doing intervals or lactate threshold (tempo) runs, aka speedwork. But you run longer at specified optimal percentage of maximum heart rate -- about 75% and 80%. You never really need to run in the lactate accumulation zone (90%+ of HR max), but your muscles respond over time by recruiting more fibers and building more mitochondria per fiber...thus overall a you get a higher density of mitochondria. The net result is that your lactate thresholds and VO2 max do indeed increase even though you don't do speedwork. In short, you can run faster without going lactic. This is a fairly short overview of what I mean by aerobic training.
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