Bleh... Lactate Threshold Work Sucks

I hate it. It's a necessary evil, but I really hate it. The idea is to push yourself well into that upper limit of your heart rate so you can improve both your aerobic capacity (aka the VO2max) and improve your body's acid tolerance. Like I said, necessary evil in the world of sport, but it's rarely a pretty thing to do.

This weekend I ran a 6.6 mile loop in Brooklyn. It was a really good run, but it had a number of stops and starts in it as I was trying to hunt down a photo opportunity for my dear old Dad. The pace time got really wonky because of all of the hunting around, but I noticed something interesting just before mile 5... one of my favorite upbeat songs came on and I glanced down and caught sight of my speed on my GPS. 6:43/mile. Sometimes things like that pop up on the screen and its just a little hiccup due to weird interference with satellites, but it usually gets worked out when the data upload corrects things. I made a note of the time and definitely that I was running a lot faster than normal and would struggle to keep it up beyond this one song, but just kept going. I was having fun. When I came back home and uploaded all my data I found out it really wasn't off. Somewhere in the middle of this run I had dropped to a sub-7 pace. This was the fastest I had ever run in my entire life. Crazy. In the end, my overall pace worked out to a 9:40, which is ok and certainly improving from where it had been, but I could tell that my limiting factor was just my cardio system not used to running this fast. My legs were feeling ready to do a lot more. And this told me I needed to get a little more focused on catching my cardio back up to where it ought to be. And that means LT training.

Sunday was my Crossfit day. Coincidentally we did a "metcon" WOD (are you starting to learn the lingo yet? WOD = workout of the day). Metcon stands for metabolic conditioning, so basically its similar to LT work in that you go all out and see what you can do in hopes of improving your overall ability to do crazy aerobic workouts. The metcon workout we were doing was called a Tabata, which is named for a Japanese researcher Izumi Tabata who came up with this craziness. Basically it's a way that you can, in parallel, train both your aerobic and anaerobic pathways concurrently, which until his break-through in 1996 was considered something that had to be trained independently. So a Tabata interval can be applied to any number of different exercises, but it is administered the same way. It runs like this: In 20 seconds do as many reps as you can of an exercise. Rest 10 seconds. Repeat this 20/10 cycle for a total of 8 times. It's an all-out kinda gig that lasts 4 minutes. But it's an very intense 4 minutes of everything you got. But this is Crossfit. So its not like its going to stop there. No no my friends.

Our WOD was called the "Tabata Something Else." Weird name, I know. It runs like this: Pull Up Tabata, Push Up Tabata, Sit Up Tabata, Squat Tabata. So string the 8 x 20 seconds all out/ 10 seconds rest all together for a solid 16 minutes of hell on earth and you have Tabata Something Else. Starting out with pull-ups was killer. I knew it was going to be killer so I dropped to the green band resistance and tried to kip as many of the pull-ups as I could, but the truth is that much that fast was killing my forearms most of all. I have small hands and was apparently on the larger pull up bar, so that didn't help. In the end, I got 48 pull-ups in the 8 segments of 20 seconds. That needs some work. Over to push-ups. I got 66. Those were pretty painful too, but not nearly so much. On to sit-ups and I got another 66. I could have gotten more but I didn't get over to my station in enough time, which sucks, so that will improve next time for sure. Squats were my best of the bunch. I got 96 in. I managed to get better with almost each round, so my last round was my best. I think a lot of that was my hamstrings being tight at the beginning but as we went on it got a little easier to pick it up. So with that I was pretty pleased.

So let's get to today's run, shall we? I knew I was going to push myself pretty hard this time. My goal was to average sub-9. In general, I run faster in the morning, but my morning got usurped by work drama, so I wound up running in the middle of the day. Challenge #1-- this was going to make my heart rate naturally higher anyway. Challenge #2, I overdressed. It wound up being in the 50s and sunny and while I knew that before heading out, it didn't translate as well as it could to my clothing. So I was running hot. My goal was 3 and change, so I was keeping it short, but I wanted it fast and hard. And boy did I get it. Up until just after the completion of mile 2, I was averaging an 8:52, but at that point it all kind of fell apart. My heart rate was averaging not just high but very high and suddenly I hit a number I didn't think I could. Until today I thought my max heart rate was 185. All the testing I had done put it right about there and the hardest runs I had done maxed out around 179, so I was feeling like this was a pretty good guess. Max heart rate is a static number. It doesn't change. The Lactate Threshold changes as you get more fit so you can run harder and closer to that max number without falling apart, but max stays consistent. Your heart can only beat so hard and this magic number is unique to individuals. So when I got home I found my heart rate had maxed at 187. Which means that my true max is probably even a little higher since I am pretty sure I didn't hit my breaking point today, but it explains why it all fell apart at that point. I carried on to 3.6 but it was much more of a struggle after that, so I stopped and walked a little bit to catch my breath. Final result was again a 9:40, but overall I am ok with that.

It's definitely taking me some work to get my speed back, but even averaging that right now is perfectly ok with me. If that's all I get out of this, I can live with that. But I have a sense I might be able to go a little bit faster, so we'll keep trying. This week is going to get a little crazy busy with work, so I am not sure whats going to happen with the usual schedule. Here's hoping I can hold it all together and be good to go, but it'll play out as it does, right?

So yeah, that's whats going on. Happy to be back in my cave post Thanksgiving. While it was fun to see my family, my innards weren't too happy to come out of the cave. I kinda felt like crap for a few days afterwards and I think its just because I haven't eaten bread or dairy products in a while now, so it really messed me up again. Yea for Paleo feeling normal now. I *heart* my cave.

More later.