When looking at Vdot and training, which should take priority...the training pace or the training HR % ?
For E, M-pace, and Threshold training it has both listed. They should obviously correlate with one another, but is pace the major player?
Marathon training.
Thanks
Pace of course.
If you're training at the appropriate pace given your current racing ability, your heart rate should be in the proper zone and vice versa.
For easy runs, I don't monitor heart rate. If it's a recovery day, I don't watch the pace either and run at a pace that allows for recovery.
I think it's most important to watch heart rate during threshold and marathon paced running because there's a smaller pace variance than with easy runs.
That makes sense...thanks for the help.
Pace for sure. HR is most helpful when you need to make adjustments for things like hot weather.
The problem with running to specific HR zones is that your HR will creep upward throughout the workout, so a constant HR usually means gradual slowing.
800 dude wrote:
The problem with running to specific HR zones is that your HR will creep upward throughout the workout, so a constant HR usually means gradual slowing.
This doesn't happen much at all once you are really aerobically fit.
Sure it does. For almost everyone, unless they're going VERY easy and temperatures are VERY cool. I've been running reasonably high mileage, with significant stretches averaging over 100/week, for over a decade. My HR climbs in every workout. It's pretty stable at recovery paces and easy runs in cool weather, but anything that I would perceive as requiring effort is a different story. Elite athletes experience cardiac drift during the course of marathons as well, and marathon pace is one of the slowest "workout" paces that most runners do.
If you have to do a recovery run at 60-65%, start at 60% and end at 65%. No way that you are slowing down during your run...
Neither pace nor heart rate! Heart rate is subject to too many variables. Pace is likewise something that cannot be guaranteed ; on some days a 10 mile run at a certain pace will feel easy, on other days the same pace will feel very hard. Think EFFORT rather than pace or fiddling around with a heart rate monitor. The only thing that an athlete can guarantee on any day is the amount of effort put into that day's training. Both Lydiard and Cerutty in their different ways stress that the athlete should be the judge of any days training not arbitrary figures. This holds good whether you are running until "pleasantly tired" (a la Lydiard) or "embracing pain" on a Cerutty style fartlek session.