Hi,
Hoping for some assistance here as I'm growing more and more frustrated with complete lack of progress through training.
Background: I'm 36 and about 2 years ago I decided to turn my life around (about 15 years of not caring about fitness or diet) and started walking regularly. This quickly lead to running (C25K programme) and then just running as fast as I could not wanting to exceed a "finger in the air" HR of 160 (no idea why 160 it just happened).
I was growing frustrated with little-to-no progress running this method and couldn't really get my pace down below about 7:30 min/km. With this in mind, I was looking at different ways to increase my aerobic base to hopefully bring this down to under 6 min/km as that is my current target (not a great time but happy for it to me a short term goal) and also expand some options in the future for longer distances like half marathons or full marathons. This lead me to MAF...
My frustration is that I have been doing this for a month now, and actually have gone backwards in terms of progress. I'm struggling to keep my heart rate below my MAF, 144 (usually takes about 10-20 seconds of running depending on how far along I am before I need to walk again) but I was persevering as I know there have been multiple success stories with increases aerobic base leading to improved pace.
My weekly averages are:
week 1 - 9:04 min/km
week 2 - 9:06 min/km
week 3 - 9:04 min/km
week 4 - 9:09 min/km
I have patience and fully understand that this is a long term training programme and not to see results straight away, however I wasn't expecting to go backwards in progress.
Alongside this, my "estimated" VO2 Max is plummeting (down from 43 to 36 now in 1 month). Whilst I again understand that this is purely estimated, I was a bit shocked to see it plummet so hard. However I'm not really using this as a reliable metric, I'm using my Pace instead.
Has anyone seen this backwards progress initially or is it simply that MAF may not be for me (probably likely that the 180 - age formula doesn't work for me thus showing no progress)?
I enjoy running daily and would like to maintain a lower intensity run, so is it something I should persevere with or maybe look to switch to the Zone 2 / LTHR method / 80/20 methodology?
Outside running, my diet is good (well balanced, lots of fruits/veg and low sugars/fats etc) and my sleep is great (solid 8 hours good quality sleep for the most part).
Thanks in advanced
Daniel