There seems to be an ongoing argument between track and field purists and exercise science guys as to the makeup of the 1500 meters in terms of aerobic and anaerobic output. Some say that the metric mile is 50% aerobic and 50% anaerobic while others say that this notion is just crazy. What is the truth about the 1500 meters and can we all agree on the % of aerobic vs anaerobic?
don't expect an agreement for the 1500 the 800 or the 400. But I suspect the aerobic and anaerobic contributions for 6 minute milers and 4:00 milers are different.
it depends who you are and how you race it.
i believe the pendulum is shifting to greater aerobic contributions.
the longer you are out there running the greater the aerobic contribution (i.e. the slower you are)
it would follow then that females have larger aerobic contributions.
australian institute of sport has done some recent studies you can google. I think they found that the men's 800 is 60% aerobic, 40% anaerobic. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the 1500 will be even greater than 60%
Do you mean 1500m at race pace? A 1500m warmup is virtually 100% aerobic. The difficulty with finding out the truth, is finding an accurate way to measure the different energetic contributions. The difficulty with getting agreement on the truth, is that the question is generally irrelevant. Getting it wrong doesn't matter, and very few care enough to actually measure it, preferring instead to faithfully cling to something they read in a book, or on the web.
If you follow this link, you can find a table (unattributed) which says that 1500m is 50% aerobic:
http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/aerobic-and-anaerobic-energy-systems-39444#
If you look here, you can see that a table (from Astrand 1977) indicates that a "4 minute" effort is 65% aerobic:
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=283441&page=0
At that time, "Tinman" accused that data of being based on an old "oxygen debt" model which overestimates anaerobic energy contributions.
Later, Perronet and Thibault used isotope tracers to measure respective instantaneous energy contributions, and published the results in 1989, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, measuring 83% (+/- 3%) aerobic energy contribution for the 1500m.
Luckily for 1500m runners, since the races were found to be more aerobic, so was their training.
Forgot to link where I found 83%
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=458338&page=51
I did not read the referenced books or journals, to confirm what was posted.