Thursday, September 28, 2006

What a useless bloody exercise that turned out to be...

Well, I dunno about my poor colleagues Keren and Satohi, who I sucked into running the Maffetone upper aerobic limit test with me, but for me it turnedout to be fairly useless. Oh, I think the run was a good aerobic training run, and I suppose I can take heart from the fact that I am too fit for Mr/Dr Maffetone, but basically all it proved was that I don't have any drift over 10 km at what is supposed to be my upper aerobic heart rate (143 beats per minute). Here is the data from tonights test of running 20 laps of the 400-m track at a heart rate of 143 (and not, this was after 9 km of warming up at about 5:15/km).
Lap Time Heart rate
1 0:07:18 140
2 0:07:41 143
3 0:07:42 143
4 0:07:42 143
5 0:07:43 142

So the first lap was a bit fast at a lower heart rate because we'd had a few minutes rest before getting into it. After that there was a bit of fluctuation from lap to lap and within laps, but I stuck pretty close to the target heart rate. It was mentally tough though and took a lot of concentration as my body didn't seem to like that pace and wanted to either slow down or speed up. And look at it...what can I take from that? I suppose the only thing I could hope for is that if I repeat the test every few weeks my average pace could get faster. I certainly can't hope to get less drift! One second!? Maybe I should try it again at a higher heart rate...148 perhaps? That is what Hadd says is my maximum heart aerobic heart rate, i.e, 80% of HRmax (and is what I have been going off for a fair while now as my upper aerobic training guide). Hadd versus Maffetone, let the battle begin!

Keren and Satohi, my apologies: I hope you got more out of it then I did...but then again, as all scientists know, even a null result is still a result.

Tonight: 21.8 km
Week: 42.8 km

4 comments:

Ewen said...

I agree Steve, that a slightly higher heart rate might work better for you. I think Maffetone is a bit arbitrary - like the 220 minus age for maximum HR which doesn't apply to all. I think it's a good repeatable fitness test.

With my slack marathon PB... I never regarded myself as being able to run marathons (I'm with Ron Clarke on that one). The 3:11:02 was a last minute decision - I'd been doing long runs 15-18 miles for general training and thought if I few in a few 21 milers I could do a 'decent' marathon.

Splits were about 93/98, however it was a 17:26 PB so I was happy to leave it at that.

Clairie said...

Stephen, thats a great session. I should give it a try.

However like Ewen said - I think you need a higher HR to use.

My test says 189 but I am on the hills/in the finishing straight sometimes with 190 on the register! So hopefully my MAX Hr is higher than that. Either that or each race I am heading for a heart attack.

Also as Ewen - the wise one says, it is a good test for repeating and testing the difference.

2P said...

Nice long run in any event Steve - my heart rate is 143 just stepping on and off the scales at the moment ;-)

Keren_m said...

I agree, but mainly because I stuffed up by not turning off the auto lap function and then having the pod run out of juice. But it was a good mental challenge, seeing that I had to let everyone pass me when I wanted to go with them. Still, I managed to do 18km on the night, 6 more km than planned.

And I found a way to do LT tests for both running and biking, and will do it on Sunday.