Altitude & middle distance racing

You just need to keep in touch with your speed when you're doing easy runs or base and such, striders after runs. The longer recoveries is a fact of life there but you also become very efficient.

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anyone?? =/

altitude newbie wrote:

anyone?? =/

ok, maybe i can help you a lil. i'm currently in flagstaff (7,000 ft)for a month or so. i am a 800/1500 guy who has mostly concentrated on the 8 but will prolly start focussing more on the 15. i have found that my strength the last 150 of an 800 is very low and therefore i don't finish well. science says after 90sec of a fast paced 800, your body relies solely on your aerobic strength to help you finish. with that said, i think training at altitude will give you huge strength gains that can help you with mid distance events.

Like the guy said above make sure you're doing plenty of strides after you have acclimated to the altitude and you won't lose your speed. but if you do, speed is easy to regain when back at sea level for a few weeks. besides, the gains you'll make aerobically will be well worth it. good luck!

you need to do speed work up only 100sec, after 100sec you will feel the altitude, so it's better to run from 30sec up to 100sec that would be a good area to do speed. this is good for your 800m. for the mile you should do 1000m time trial, every 10days. walk all your recoveries. drink water slow thur the day. train smart race easy.

Thanks for the replies, I didn't even notice, I thought this thread just died lol. So the general consensus seems to be that, in terms of the 1500 & 800:

1. You won't be able to do as much fast paced / intense workouts at altitude

2. The aerobic gains you make while training at altitude are enough to offset this loss

3. Doing striders after your easy runs will help you keep speed

Does this seem to be about right? In that case, it doesn't seem that living at altitude really hurts middle distance training too much, and in fact can be a big advantage. Altitude is better than sea level then, what do you guys think?

I wouldn't say that altitude is necessarily the clear cut winner. If it was, every elite american would spend most of their time training at altitude. I mean, look at CU this year, they finished 15th at NCAAs and they all live and train at altitude. Sea level does have advantages that altitude doesn't. The best thing is to mix it up and train at altitude and do sea level stints, or vice versa. Just my .02