Week 1: Running Hard Is Easy


Mike Finch |

Alana Doyle is a committed trail and road runner, and has completed events such as the famed 160km UTMB (Ultra Trail Mont Blanc) run in France. This year, she aims to improve her performance by learning to make the best use of her heart rate monitor.

 

Alana tackling the infamous VO2 Max Test. Image by Oliver Munnik
Alana tackling the infamous VO2 Max Test. Image by Oliver Munnik

I could feel the panic starting to well up as the whirr of the treadmill seemed almost deafening and my heart felt as if it would pop out of my chest. I was just a few moments away from signaling to the Lezandre Wolmarans, a Senior Consultant at Cape Town’s Sport Science Institute’s High Performance Centre, that I could go no more.

The mask covering my face felt suffocating and I’d only been running for just on 10 minutes. I was doing the infamous VO2 Max Test in an effort find out my limits and my athletic potential. The treadmill was going so fast that I felt I would shoot off the back but, as soon as I gave the pre-agreed thumbs down, Lezandre hit the stop button and the pain was over.

My report suggested a VO2 Max of 56 with a maximum heart rate of 195 – a good result. But in her report Lezandre also suggested that I hadn’t actually gone flat out. You gotta be kidding me!

It was the next step in a journey that had started with RW Editor Mike Finch. I had recently started wearing a heart rate strap linked to my GPS watch which kept track of my ‘training and recovery’ and I was explaining to him that I had little idea of what the numbers were telling me.

148, 167, 182, 198, 205… They were all just a string of digits with no real benefit to me. What I had worked out (which isn’t rocket science) is that when the numbers hit the upper 180’s and early 190’s forward propulsion became a serious challenge. Conversely, anything below 150 felt like a breeze.
Before I knew it, Mauritz Jansen van Rensburg, head coach of the Cape Town Marathon, was on board and offering to help me maximise my running potential through a coordinated heart rate-based training programme.

Image by Oliver Munnik
Alana at the Grootvadersbosch Trail Run. Image by Oliver Munnik

My goal was simple: Having run the 160km Ultra Trail Mont Blanc last year (and finished!), I was looking at ways of improving my performance across a variety of events, including this year’s Cape Town Marathon, and working out how to correctly use my HRM to achieve it.

It sounds simple enough, but most runners, including myself, often get it horribly wrong. Hard is often not hard enough, and easy is almost always not easy enough.

With this in mind, easy sessions could quite possibly see my pace reduced to walking while a maximum effort would need to be viciously hard… so tough actually, that I would be sweating tears.

“I could see how many of my sessions were in the mushy middle…”

… that murky zone which isn’t tough enough to build form while simultaneously being too strenuous to provide adequate recovery. These sessions were just making me fatigued and adding no real benefit.

There are generally two ways of working out what is EASY and what is HARD. RPE (Rate Of Perceived Exertion) is a subjective method and is what most training junkies base their daily workouts on. BUT For many of us RPE is a somewhat broken metric as our ‘all-in’ brains have difficulty calibrating effort.

Secondly there is heart-rate based training, an objective and more accurate way of gauging effort. So join me over the next 12 weeks as I discover, with the help of some real experts, what all those numbers on your heart rate monitor really mean!

What I learnt this week:

– To improve you need to do less of the mushy, middle effort, zones.
– VO2 Max Tests are not for sissies.
– When you think you’re flat out, you’ve still got more.
– There’s no shame in reading the user manual on your new HRM. Take the time to learn all the functionality.
– Sometimes easy isn’t easy enough.

Alana Doyle is a committed trail and road runner and has completed events like the famed 160km UTMB (Ultra Trail Mont Blanc) run in France. This year her target events include the Hout Bay Challenge Trail Run and the Sanlam Cape Town marathon.

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