Blog 6 – 17th March 2013
Happy St Patricks Day!! Hold the Guinness, Irish Stew and
all things potato, for today is testing day....cheers! The funny thing is that
I only have myself to blame, as I picked the date; it’s not my first mistake. Ok
let’s pause the celebrations and get on with this. It’s the end of training block
2, 8 weeks down and time to see whether all this training is working. With the
pub on speed dial and the green silk suit on standby, off to the University of
Hertfordshire I go (didn’t mean for that to sound like a song by the seven
dwarfs).
To replicate the
battery of tests conducted back in January, I will be getting my basic body
compositions measured, functional analysis, power measurements, biomechanical
assessment, running economy analysis, lactate sub-maximal cycle test and then
the unavoidable pièce de
résistance, the VO2max test. Sounds
a lot, right? It is! Well I’m not going to sugar coat it any longer, how did I
do? Well, Alistair and Jonathon can breathe a sigh of relief; first, third and
hundreds of other places are safe for now. I did however see some improvements
in:
ü Body weight and fat reduction
ü Jump height improvement
ü Running economy improvement
ü Heart rate reductions for
relative work
ü VO2 max increased
Great news!! So it’s
all going in the right direction but as discussed with the head of the study Dr
Justin Roberts, to keep things on track I need to work on improving my
endurance economy and capacity, working at a lower intensity with minimal
changes in my blood lactate accumulation. In the words of Dr Roberts, I’m an
acid producer. Rub litmus paper on my forehead and it’ll turn orange – not quite
but you get the idea. It’s great that I can keep exercising during high levels
of lactate production but ultimately fatigue and the will to stop will take over.
This fitness component, although important, is more akin to high intensity
exercisers but far removed from the world of an Ironman.
To help, Justin has
given us all homework - heart rate training zones to follow, stick to and live
by (see chart below). For me, I need to become more accustomed to working in
those lower ranges, trying to make a rightward shift of the lactate curve... Brrr
that reminds me of my physiology lectures back at Brunel. Basically, I need to
train my body to lower the acclimation of lactate – work more in zone 1-3, a
closer representation to the intensity that I will be following during the
Ironman, slow and snail like.
Training
Zone
|
Heart Rate
(bpm)
|
|
Cycling
|
Running
|
|
1 – Recovery
|
97-110
|
108-123
|
2 – Steady State
|
110-123
|
123-137
|
3 – Lactate Threshold
|
123-136
|
137-152
|
4 – Tempo
|
136-143
|
152-159
|
5 – Intervals
|
143+
|
159+
|
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