See ‘In The Zones’, below, for more on recommended training zones and how to know when you’re hitting each of them. You’ll often read about ‘ threshold pace’ and ‘ tempo runs’ – they fall into this middle zone. But you’re still in control, and you could speed up if you wanted to. You’ll feel like you’re working, and that if you picked the pace up slightly, you’d cross a threshold into Zone 3, where the proverbial bear will jump on your back. This is what we’d call ‘heavy’, but it’s also manageable. Think of how you feel during a 5km time trial, or hard intervals. At the other end of the spectrum is Zone 3 training, which is what physiologists describe as ‘severe’ once you enter this zone, fatigue is inevitable – it’s a matter of time before the effort becomes too much, and you’re forced to slow down or stop. There is easy training, which is done in Zone 1. The mistake many runners make when they’re aiming to improve is to push too hard too often, as well as not spending enough time in the easiest training zones.īroadly and most simply, we can divide training into three zones. There’s physiology behind this – low-intensity training, well within what we call the aerobic training zone, drives adaptations that make us better at endurance running, even when our goal is higher intensity. What this means is that Kipchoge gets better at running fast mostly by running slowly. But compare that to his marathon pace of 2:55, and you’ll appreciate just how easy those runs are.
Which is still quite lively, bearing in mind he’s doing this in Eldoret, at 2,000 metres above sea level. But of those 13, 10 are slow, easy runs – so slow that many club runners would be able to tag along they range between 4:00 and 5:00 per kilometre. Kipchoge racks up 13 sessions a week, two a day every day except for Sunday, when he takes the afternoon off.
Especially the intensity elements of training. Such repetition goes hand in hand with the second key principle: don’t overdo it. We need to avoid the temptation of tinkering, and rather earn our physiological adaptations through disciplined repetition.
0 kommentar(er)
