Sunday, June 7, 2009

Sunday Week total 100 miles.

am) 10 miles at 8200 ft+ altitude, very hilly terrain with pelting, stingy sleet at over 8500 ft altitude, just rain below that. Froze my ass off.
Averaged 6:37 pace per mile today and never broke AeT.

3 comments:

cdnhollywood said...

That new banner photo says a lot about you and your training. Nice work. Thanks for showing the rest of us how to HTFU.

Alex said...

Hi Tim, would you say that your training has become more "Lydiaresque" now compared to the training that you did when you first moved into altitude? It seems to me that you were more or less doing a lot of steady work back at sea level and when you tried to do the harder stuff while moving at the same time to higher altitude didn't give you enough time to adapt. Thanks for the great blog and especially the articles on Ironman training.

Cheers,
Alex

Lucho said...

Hollywood- Nails baby... nails. Thanks for the good word!

Alex- Lydiard? I don't really think so, but maybe, in a far removed sense. Lydiard was a 'steady state' guy which is still too intense by my standards. I target an intensity that is ~15 beats below my steady state levels. I certainly made a huge mistake in my approach this year. Part of the problem was my choice to listen to a coach that has little understanding of what makes me tick. I doubt there are many people out there that know what makes me tick! So I can't blame the coach.
"steady" is a term I've heard a lot but I've never tried to understand what it means. Steady by a marathon coaches definition is 1/2 marathon pace or LT! Once again- terminology is both the key and the limiter in communication. When I define my training I use 4 levels of intensity.
Recovery- HR is below 130.
Base or aerobic volume- HR 140-150
AeT- Marathon pace or HR 160-170
Tempo- Or LT. HR 170-178.
Never go above 178 unless it's a race or I'm going to be eaten by a puma.
Explaining my use of HR 140-150 in scientific terms would be difficult for me. One could call it MAF, or close to it. What I have found through 12 years of huge volume training is that this HR range allows me to both train a crap load, and also make significant gains in aerobic fitness. I get relatively fast from training here. So I don't mess with it. What has happened in the last month is that I have made larger gains (relative to where I started after my melt down)than I ever have. I'm nearing the same level of pace VS HR at 8200 ft altitude that I was at 5400 ft altitude.