Mr. Renato Canova: Could You Please Answer a Question About Effective Ways to Improve the Lactate Threshold?

eat shit & die mother f***er

Hey Dunes Runner - follow these links, read the articles and then see if you're still compelled to spout your obnoxious, ill-founded bullshit.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/2000/0918/china.oly.drugs.html

http://www.sptimes.com/News/090700/Sports/Citing_family__Agassi.shtml

http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/20000907/isp07028.html

You can't seriously think that calling the 1993 performances into question is an outrage. Deeming them legitimate is the real outrage, and only an idiot or a head-wound victim could even consider it. Get that shit off the books, stat. It's an injustice and an embarrassment to an already tainted sport to allow times produced by a despotic, cheating madman (Junren probably qualifies as a sociopath) to sit on the IAAF's list of world records.

Of course, faced with the incontrovertible fact that the befouled members of Ma's Army were doped from their toenails to the tippity-tops of their misshapen skulls, you'll surely just come back and say the EPO test itself is flawed, even though you don't know jack f*** about it. Poo on you.

Hello,

I am a young distance runner without much experience.

I have seen your other works where your athletes use long threshold work like 4x5K, but I am sure I am not capable of such programs as I do not run 20K of intervals.

I normally do sessions like 3x2K.

My 2 questions:

Can you provide 2-3 workouts directed that are particularly improving the lactate threshold 2 months before a racing period (cross-country)?

2nd question:

I have no measurements like lactate monitors, etc. How do your athletes monitor that they are staying below the threshold?

Is there some method that can be used to know this?

I thank you for your help if you are able to answer.

I am not Renato, however I think that I could be of help here....

to improve lactate threshold in the preparatory period one should do the following:

Run aerobic every day with on long run of at least 90:00 each week. When this long run becomes relatively easy you are now ready do start training lactate threshold.

Key workouts are as follows:

1. 2000M trial: which will determine the key paces once every 4-6wks.

2. Reps of 10-20:00 @ 2000M pace + 1:30-2:00 once a week. Try to accumulate a total of at least 40:00 of such work.

For you this may look like this: 4X 1.5-2mi, with 400M RE

3. Reps of 4-8:00 @ 2000M pace + 1:00-1:30 once a week. Try to accumulate at total of at least 20:00 of such work.

For you this may look like this 3X 2000M, with 400M RE

Finish off each of these workouts with 6-8X 100M strides and then warmdown.

Good luck...

Lactate Threshold pace is about 8% slower than your 5k/3-mile pace. If you run 5:30 per mile (330 seconds), for example, then your LT is 330 x 1.08 = 356.4 seconds or 5:56.4. You can run a local race and then use the pace from it to calculate your LT. Otherwise, just ran at a strong effort, but slower than 5k pace. Make sure your breathing is not labored. I also suggest that you work on the Aerobic Threshold, which occurs at a slower pace than LT. Just add 1 minute per mile to your current 5k pace. For a high schooler, run 6-8 mile runs at this pace once or twic per week. Do striders to improve your leg speed, but not more than 600m worth total. For example, you might run 6 x 100m striders with 200m jogs. Tinman

tinman......easily my favourite poster on the boards.....you're like the gift that keeps on giving.....thanks

TINMAN TINMAN:I always save bits and pieces of your posts,because they are always so informative.Could you some day when you have time, put together all your knowledge.Your personal coaching experiences with runners is an accumulation of years of experience that many of us will never get. For example I just read a recent post of yours,how you have found that runners improve 15 second per mile in a race, for every 10 miles of increase in weekly mileage up to 60 miles,when the time improvment decreases

at slower rate.Anything you could come up with would be greatly appreciated.

thanks je

actually, my rate of improvement barely moves between 35 and 60, between 60 and 100 it increases dramatically.

If I don't run 85 miles in a week it is barely what I consider training, it is more like resting.

Even at the age of 42.8 a 60 mile weeks feels like recreational-weekend warrior type training.

Sure, there are some pretty talented guys that are okay runners on light mileage, but I ain't talented.

Yes, I thank you Tinman.

Perhaps Renato can also answer?

You are proof positive of the Socrates philosophy: Know Thyself.

Thanks for sharing your story. Tinman

You are quite welcome. Glad to help you! Tinman

Tinman wrote:

You are proof positive of the Socrates philosophy: Know Thyself.

Thanks for sharing your story. Tinman

You are welcome.

An interesting thing to think about:

Is there an intensity threshold below which improvements will not occur? If you run 40 miles per week at 8:00 pace and you are quite fit (fit enough that 8:00 pace is about 55% of your max VO2), will running 60 miles per week improve your performance, automatically? Just because you increase your mileage, it doesn't mean you will become more fit if the intensity is below your personal fitness threshold (let us say 60-65% of max vO2).

Now, pay attention, because the following is tricky. Let us say that you increase your mileage to 90 miles per week, instead of just to 60 miles per week from your original 40 miles per week. Let us say also that you run the same easy pace that is about 55% of aerobic capacity. Based on the statements that no improvement occured when you increased your easy running mileage from 40 to 60 per week, we might therefore assume that increasing from 40 to 90 at an easy pace would create the same dismal result; no improvement. Ha! Now, I've got you!

Somewhere around 70-75 miles per week you started getting really tired and depleted in your muscle fibers that usually generate all the force for running at 8:00 pace. So, what now? You stimulate your body to use newer fibers to create force and they improve their fitness, which was never challenged before. As Peter Snell has said often, you stimulate fast oxidative fibers to contribute to the power output because the slower ones become exhausted as mileage rises high. So, in essence, you work on those fibers that are normally not called into play until you run at a pace about one minute per mile slower than 5k pace (we call this the Aerobic Threshold pace). In other words you end up stimulating your faster fibers to become better at using aerobic processes when your slow twitch, endurance fibers get tired and fall by the wayside at generating force to keep on chugging along at 8:00 pace.

Do you see now that when you run slowly, you have to run a lot of miles to fatigue fibers? This will result in improved aerobic performance and result in improved racing peformance.

Now, if we go back to 40 miles per week, but run it at 7:00 pace, which for this example is 70% of max VO2, well above the minimum stimulus threshold previously mentioned, we experience a different situation if we increse mileage from 40 to 60 per week. Instead of having no improvement in performance, we have a 30 second per mile increase in peformance, if we do this long enough to adjust to the new workload. This scenario is what happens to a lot of high school kids who run 18 minutes for a 5km race on 40 miles per week of training, then improve to 16:30 when they up their mileage to 60 per week. They had sufficient stimulus all along (they were 5-10% above the minimum threshold while running at an average of 70% of max VO2).

After such a wonderful improvement in performances, increasing mileage from from 60 to 80 miles per week, running at the same intensity, about 70% for an average, as you up the mileage seems like a great idea. Will there be a similar improvement of 30 seconds per mile? Probably not! Why? Because somewhere around 70 miles per week a runner's body stops responding in the same proportions as before when the workload was increase from 40 to 60 per week. Maybe improvements of 15 seconds per mile happen when one goes from 60 to 70 per week, perhaps just 10 seconds per mile, but when you move from 70 to 80 per week, you only gain 4 or 5 seconds per mile, perhaps none.

Once you reach 70 per week at the arbitrary intensity of 70% average of your max VO2, you have to figure out how you are going to gain improvements. Your choices? Increase mileage, but by this time, you realize that if you going to get more from your muscle fibers, you either gotta up the intensity or the mileage a lot. Realize what I am saying. Either increase the quality of some or all of your runs, some being smarter, theoretically, or increase your mileage by a big bump. Why a big bump? As described earlier, increasing 10 miles per week from 70 to 80 does not improve your performance more than about 4-5 seconds per mile and probably not at all form 80 to 90 per week. So, you gotta fatigue your muscle fibers a bunch in order for the mileage bump to work.

I say, therefore, you better bump it at least 20 per week, perhaps 30 per week, if you are not going to increase the intensity of training. This is critical to understanding why small bumps in mileage, assuming you are above the initial minimum threshold, will not improve performance, generally. Once you are past about 70-75 per week, you gotta bump it a lot if you are not going to increase intensity. Think about it and consider your own history of training and racing. Tinman

Another bump for Renato

one more bump

Tinman:

What is your "hypothetical runner's" VO2max?

Probably about 70 ml/kg/min.

I just looked at my example, which is purely hypothetical, and the example of 8:00 per mile being 55% of max VO2 fits in with a runner who can a 5k in about 15:00. Don't sweat the details. The points about intensity or mileage increases being necessary if minimum threshold is not being reached was the focus of the discussion. Tinman

Tinman,

Thanks for your insight as always. I am curious as to what you would consider the different training zones are for a middle distance runner (5/10k)? For instance I have seen you mention aerobic and anaerobic threshold training, what is the difference physically here? I know that Coe advocates 5 different zones and I think it is the same for Daniels. It would almost seem like you are splitting threshold training into 2 distinct zones. Once again thanks for your insight. Matt

I do not intentially split aerobic and anaerobic threshold (aka Lactate Threshold) into zones. All is continous, I contend, in the energy spectrum.

For example, in my view, running 4 miles at 4 mmols (LT) is equal to 8 miles at 2 mmols (Aerobic Threshold) is equal to 16 miles run slowly at 1 mmol. Tinman