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.
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