If I ran a 10k all out and took the avg. hr, would that give me a pretty accurate LT number? Thanks in advance…
Close. Perhaps a little high.
I have heard that a persons LT is close to the effort for a one hour of running as fast as you can for that one hour - ie a one hour time-trial
Fleck’s right – at least according to Daniels’ work (*Daniels Running Formula). *Daniels would say that LT pace is 15 or so seconds slower than 10K pace, with (one would assume) a correspondingly lower HR. You should be able to do a 10K at above your LT HR. Daniels considers the half marathon the definitive test of LT conditioning since it’s about an hour for elite runners.
Most AG runners do tempo runs too hard. You don’t need to do 5k or 10k pace. You should feel like you could keep going for an hour (but only do 20-40 minutes). 10 minutes after a tempo run you should feel fresh and recharged. I knew this for a long time before I finally let it sink in and stopped wrecking myself on tempo runs. Leave your watch timer off so you don’t end up trying to race yourself every time out.
in theory, it should give you a lactate threshold pace.
that said, i run 1/2 marathons well above my LT (163=lt. avg 1/2 mara = 174), so i dont know if it works for everyone. Best bet is to go and get the test done if you are really concerned with accuracy.
good luck,
-kevin
Lactate Threshold…I became aware of the proposed value on training at LT about 10 years ago…it was going to allow the record books to be rewritten…since that time the most noticeable athletic performance(Lance) has been by a guy who says"screw lactate training, I’m going to increase my LT, increase my Max and increase the time I can spend there. By training as hard as I can for as long as I can"…that is at least the impression I got from Phil Legget when covering the tour. Are folks out there doing a whole bunch of LT training or have attitudes moved away from that line of thinking?
Most AG runners do tempo runs too hard. You >don’t need to do 5k or 10k pace. You should feel >like you could keep going for an hour (but only do >20-40 minutes).
I’m probably guilty of that. It never quite made sense to me that a workout done at lower intensity than 10K pace for a duration less than a typical 10K race would count as a “quality” workout if training for 10K/Intl. Triathlon. Am I crazy?
Lance is, of course, welcome to call it whatever he wants, and to use whatever flippant descriptions he likes. But you know – his body works the same way as everyone else’s (just better). He has a lactate threshold, as do you and me and Paul Tergat. By spending the right amount of time training up against that threshold, he has raised it to a higher percentage of his capacity that most of his competitors. But, it is still there, nonetheless. Lance is right, you don’t need a HR monitor to train. Paul Tergat doesn’t use one, and he goes pretty fast. What makes Lance special is not the “absolute level” of his threshold anyway, it is the amount of power he can apply when at that threshold.
To be clear, we are not out on the roads to improve our LTs – we are out on the roads to *go faster ***when at or below our LTs. **
We only have two choices in training: how fast we go and how long we go.
Everything else is just a result of those two decisions. Among the results is that, if you choose right combinations of how fast and how far then various changes occur in your body to allow you to go faster and farther. Pace/power at LT is the single most important one of those changes.