A bit of Self Adjustment

The great thing about the Maffetone method is that it's self-adjusting. I'd been feeling a bit under the cosh after two foot races and a sprint session on the rower within the space of two weeks, with my performances suffering in response.

Prior to those races I’d been running at about 5:10-5:17/km (8:20-8:30min/mile).  After those hard sessions I a good 10 seconds per km off that pace.  Cycling I was down by 10W or so over an hour, and on the rower I was off the pace by about 3secs/500m, but more importantly I had to really slow down through a session to manage the HR.

So what can I do about it? Pretty simple really.  

All I needed to do was go back to the basics of capping the HR to keep all sessions aerobic only.

So last Sunday it was a deliberately very slow and steady 16km running at even slower pace than I had been doing, and then in Aberdeen this week two runs that were pretty mixed in results.  One was rushed and inconsistent, the second I paid much more attention to and apart from a bit of a blip when I turned into the wind and didn’t slow my pace quickly enough, the HR was well in control.  Neither run was fast, or even back to my previous pace, but they were relaxed and I was back to not feeling tired the next day.

Now less than two weeks later I've just done the fastest 10km on the erg since I started the HR capped training.

Total) 10km / 2:13.2 / 44:23.5 / 22 / A137 / M 150 

2km splits
1) 2:12.9 / 8:51.7 / 21 / A119 / M131
2) 2:13.1 / 8:52.7 / 22 / A135 / M141
3) 2:13.0 / 8:52.1 / 22 / A140 / M145 
4) 2:13.4 / 8:53.9 / 22 / A145 / M150
5) 2:13.2 / 8:53.1 / 22 / A146 / M150

All in all less than a minute over the HR cap of 148.

Now if that’s the recovery this method can bring, that seems to be a good demonstration to me that it works.

A bit more of this in February, then I’ll start building in some harder stuff on the bike in March ahead of the start of the club time trial season.  I’ll build up over a few sessions to HR typical of the range I see in a TT and see where that takes me.  Of course, in amongst all of that, I’ll be ramping up the time on feet as well for the long race.