V02 Max Challenge

[Scott 2]

Throwing a tablespoon of sugar in with a Nuun tablet matches the oral hydration solution ratios. Recovery after an hour effort feels swift. I haven't done anything longer.

Anecdotally, I think it might cause me to continue sweating longer after the effort. Which is annoying, but also points to a probable recovery gap on longer efforts.

I don't love the idea of drinking straight sugar. I'm curious to see it on the next round of continuous glucose monitor. I don't really want the sugar water sitting on my teeth either. Makes me hesitant to regularly sip on it during multi hour bikes.

But the impact is positive


Tried my first spinning based bike ride today, just 45 minutes. It made the promised trade from legs to cardio. I could finally get my heart rate up on flats and downhill. The activity felt frenetic though, which I imagine diminishes with practice.

I can see how this would enable finding a stable zone 2 heart rate, opposed to my normal peaks and valleys. It does narrow the range of required gears. I never left the middle chain ring on my mountain bike.

I was shifting a ton, to avoid losing pedal tension. Dealing with the crummy derailuer on my older bike seems like a necessary accommodation for this style. I can see that threading heart rate with cadence would benefit greatly from a monitor as well.

I'm probably sold and likely to buy the cadence monitor.

[shaz]

@Scott 2 good for you! I predict 90rpm will feel natural within a few weeks.

[mathiverse]

I was having knee issues with biking recently and the higher rpm advice worked for me, too. Thanks, shaz and jacob!

[jacob]

Don't thank me. I was the one arguing for slow pokers mashing gears. Knee pain may be due to wrong saddle height. It's my pet peeve whenever I see someone on a bike. Almost everybody has it set too low. A good starting point is top of saddle = (top of hip bone + top of femur) / 2 when standing next to the bike ... and then adjust up or down a millimeter at a time.

[Scott 2]

Beat my 5k training PR by a minute today - 26:27. Almost two minutes faster than last week's effort. It was cooler, I had a cup of black tea, and I benefited from last week's practice:



Dunno if I'll see a faster time. I get three more weeks of attempts before the race. I'm ideally shooting for a negative time split. But don't have an intuitive feel for running at faster speeds. Or straining at higher heart rates. I know my HR can reach the low 170's, so with sufficient motivation, I probably have more to give.

The Garmin thinks I ought to hit 24:30. Which is essentially my fastest logged mile for 3.1 miles. It also continues estimating my v02 max at 46. That goal doesn't feel realistic to me. But maybe breaking 26 minutes is on the table.


With my new education on hydration, I've been eyeing handheld water bottles. I'm more seriously contemplating a 9.5 mile loop by my house. I think it'd benefit from the sugar water. Might order that and a bike cadence monitor this weekend.

[mountainFrugal]

Beat my 5k training PR by a minute today - 26:27. Almost two minutes faster than last week's effort.

Great effort! You can go sub 26! It is great to see the progress @scott2! Look at that heart rate effort. You are now regularly hitting and sustaining heart rate efforts that you feared when you first started this journey.

[Scott 2]

Thanks. This type of work goes against my very nature.

I think someone with an athlete's mindset could immediately squeeze another 10% out of my body. That's what the Garmin is telling me. And everything I understand about the data corroborates it.

But I'm still not great at trying. 49% of me wants to quit. I constantly check the watch, convinced I'm red lining. Every time, my HR shows the constraint is mental. My perception of effort remains completely unreliable.

It'll be interesting to see if the race environment overrides that behavior.

[ducknald_don]

I think someone with an athlete's mindset could immediately squeeze another 10% out of my body. That's what the Garmin is telling me. And everything I understand about the data corroborates it.

I’m married to someone who was able to do that in her youth and the long term effects have become quite significant.

[Scott 2]

I think the aggressive determination is trainable to some degree. But it's not who I am at all. Faced with discomfort, my drive wilts. Always has.

Fortunately my mindset is suited to zone 2 work. And patiently optimizing factors that reduce discomfort. I can clear a path for progress.


Along those lines - has anyone tried to personalize their hydration strategy. I'm finding online to separately estimate and replace:

1. Water
2. Salt
3. Carbs

Salt content in the sweat can vary like 1-3x by person. And density of the replacement solution needs to account for what has been lost. Relative to the blood it can be:

1. Hypotonic
2. Isotonic
3. Hypertonic

This is why people carry water, gus, salt tabs, sports drinks, etc. There is also a maximum replacement rate, which is why people hydrate as they go.

I've ordered a couple handheld water bottles, to give this a more serious try. My prior instinct was to dismiss it as an unnecessary mental crutch. Sometimes we get a little thirsty, there's water at home. But recovery with the oral rehydration solution has me reconsidering.


I see personalization options ranging from trial and error to $200 a session precision hydration coaching. There's even a $200 device that measures losses with disposable patches. Of course I want that, haha.

I'll start with trial and error though. Weighing myself before and after, making rough replacement estimates. But I am curious how others approach the problem.


I did order the bike cadence meter. $40 feels cheap for actionable data. And much cheaper than the new bikes I've been eyeing!

[Scott 2]

Disappointment in two pictures.



This morning:


0.03 miles short.

[mountainFrugal]

Great effort! I am assuming on your next attempt you will not take ~15 minutes for the remaining 0.03 miles to crush your 10k PR.

[Scott 2]

I sure hope so. This was supposed to be an easy 5.5, but I got a little mixed up. I didn't even think to check my watch.

[mountainFrugal]

If it was easy enough that you were not even checking your watch... then I think you can do a sub 1 hr 10k.

[Scott 2]

This session was hard at the end. I underestimated the distance of a new path, and I was literally running late. To meet my wife coming out of surgery. We had some debate over whether running was reasonable, so I was motivated. And I made it.

I do think a sub one hour 10k is feasible. I'll wait for a serious attempt until late fall. First, I want to set a 5k race PR. Then I have two local forest preserve loops I want to compete. 8.8 and 9.6 miles respectively. I think a fast 10k will fit well into that training.

[C40]

Did another round of tests

Shorter climb. (1.5km, 7% avg gradient)
Date - Time - power - power/bodyweight
4/17 - 6:48 - 215w - 3.3 w/kg (baseline)
5/06 - 5:53 - 250w - 3.8 w/kg
6/10 - 5:03 - 312w - 4.9 w/kg
7/11 - 4:53 - 322w - 5.1 w/kg
8/05 - 4:34 - 350w - 5.6 w/kg
9/01 - 4:21 - 370w - 6.0 w/kg

Longer climb. (9.1km, 5.4% average gradient)
Date - Time - power - power/bodyweight
4/12 - 43:00 - 170w - 2.6 w/kg
5/10 - 35:00 - 240w - 3.6 w/kg
6/15 - 30:05 - 270w - 4.3 w/kg
7/13 - 28:37 - 288w - 4.6 w/kg
8/06 - 27:21 - 308w - 4.9 w/kg
9/10 - 26:49 - 316w - 5.0 w/kg

Now I think I will start focusing on being able to ride longer rides rather than increasing my power. This is because I want/expect to go to another place for 2-3 months (during that time the weather where I live is bad for riding). So my life will be simpler there and I think I'll want to spend a lot of time riding. Also, my power improvements would be tapering off soon anyway.

I do expect to get a powermeter pretty soon, so I'll do some more testing, and might find that the power estimations above were off a bit.

[ebast]

mountainFrugal, first please excuse the turnaround time on this one as I have been dealing with some non VO2-oriented max challenges, although good news: they have not prevented me from running in circles.

More importantly, what I wanted to plant in the ground first is that I hold a great deal of respect for your knowledge, accomplishments, and most significantly your practice in this area so I take your comments seriously. They motivated a few schedule modifications already to get my miles up. I mean kilometres.

I think we're roughly in the same place on assumptions and parameters as your post. I tried to write my first few posts to be general enough without focusing a specific training plan, so as to be broadly relevant to typical training plans in case there are any other lentil-haulers out there who would like to skimp on mileage. But here's how it's particularly working by example for me:

My current (and currently unreachable, but hey, "Jacob didn't retire in a day.") two or three year target is a 3:20 time which requires a 7:37 pace. I am obtaining (a very lopsided) yearly average of ~4 hours a week by using a 20 week training schedule where the off-season base 32-wk period is a modest 3 hours/wk and the somewhat-peaked (due to ramping up and taper) 20-wk competition period averages to 6.5ish hours a week. I assume a conventional polarized training schedule so the majority 80-90% of miles would be at easy pace (my remainder would be speedwork via intervals, fartleks, progressions, with a fair amount near more zone 3-ey half marathon pace in there, as well as hill sprints and runs, etc.) where easy pace is in my case generally in the 8:00-9:00 range, probably tending more toward the lower side there.

With those modest assumptions, and not picking any specific training plan, you get an average 40-45 mi/wk. That's what my actual training plan looks like, and for color, I started off at 26mi/wk and am slowly approaching a max week just over 55 mi. My specific numbers (which shouldn't differ too much from general solutions) means I'm at about 825 mi for the competitive season and around 700mi for base period. for a yearly total of 1525 mi/year.

I think the question is to what extent I can use non-running (cycling) background activity and to substitute for what kind of training effects. This is a VO2-max thread after all, and I would expect there has to be some contribution there, especially on the non-localized systemic improvements (lung capacity, heart volume, etc). Knowing quite little on the topic, I'd assume there'd be some improvements yet for more localized aspects like blood flow, mitochondrial density and efficiency but yeah, even this would need a pretty steep scaling-back from the cycling numbers to get a running-specific contribution

This is not a neuro-muscular efficiency nor a tissue load thread but of course those are equally necessary. I may have been falling for what I guess I'd call a "fat bottle" fallacy that while by most informal tests such as those in Uphill Athlete, my aerobic capacity--not aspects of my neuromuscular ability--is the limiting factor for long runs, that doesn't mean my neuro-muscular ability or tissue load adaptations is far from being the next limiting bottleneck should I enlarge the current one.

This, meaning me, being an efficient (ha!) biological entity, I realize that it's quite likely from an adaptation parsimony argument that neuro-muscular, aerobic, and tissue/joint adaptations all track pretty closely meaning.... I'm looking for bottlenecks in a can.


When I read your post again, I think a theme was that tissue load is the major unaddressed factor here and I haven't found any rules of thumb for tissue load. I'm thinking I'd like to ask you what you would do to monitor throughout a training season for undertraining on tissue load.... however I have a bad feeling I know the answer you would say and it is: Go ahead and see if you get yourself injured on longer progression runs.

How do they know the load limits on bridges? They drive bigger and bigger trucks over until it breaks, then they weigh the last truck and rebuild the bridge.”

I'm also thinking that's the motivation to your using calories burned based on mileage, as calories would be more helpful for thinking about tissue load. I had been using heart rate where I was matching my cross-training (cycling) heart rate to heart rates for zones achieved when running (which after all, with a little computation and more data is how my watch[edit: corrected to represent that any decent watch owned by a serious contributor here likely has true optical pulse oximetry] is doing it). And then I treat cycling time as equivalent to running time with some discount factor I still haven't nailed down. Heart rate helps ensure the right zone which was an additional focus for me and then additionally I can't always use calories from generic cycling advice as I frequently find myself on a cargo bike more resembling what you'd expect to see driven around Central Park by an Italian pedicab cyclist (if I don't quite have his sort of calves, though, at my best I not infrequently vaguely smell of knock-off cologne and affogato). But my point: I frequently find myself with 30-100 lbs of additional live/dead-weight and the aerodynamic drag factor is not good. This weekend, for example I found myself carting home three stools from an actual cantina balanced not unlike circus dogs on a clown bicycle, which is inadvisable as it simply demolishes your aerodynamic efficiency, but I could not resist as if as furniture they were unimpressive, they were authentic and upon inspection I discovered they were made all the way out not in Guangdong but Gilroy, California, so that when refinishing the naugahyde seats I can convince myself should any trapped spirits be released bearing distinctive authentic garlic odors, they are from construction, not use.

TLDR: At any rate, I checked and my pulse was solid in the 120s-130s.

I'm not sure what the conversion factor should be. More crucially, it is never broken down to any kind of formula one could use for varying impacts on aerobic, neuromuscular, and tissue load effects. But here are some random mostly conventional wisdomed running texts I have laying around:

Cycling is a great general exercise. However bikes are just too efficient and this makes them less effective training tools from the time and specificity standpoint. The sitting position on the bike means that you do not have to support your full body weight which greatly reduces the energy cost of the exrcise and the muscle mass used to propel yourself. The bike also limits the range of motion, eliminating the coordination, balance, and variability of the footing required while covering uneven terrain... Any exercise, regardless of modality or intensity, will benefit an unfit person. But the benefts of cross-training diminish pretty fast once you are at the competitive recreational level. If you can only handle running less than twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) or six hours per week, then you will see benefits from adding other modes of exercise like hiking, cycling, rowing, stair machine, or even swimming.

...so it's a donut. This'd give me something like 0 benefit from cycling for aerobic.

Cycling on an Exercycle... The backs of the lower legs are not worked in cycling as they are in running, and so cycling doesn't maintain your running conditioning as well as the exercises above. If you use toe clips, however, you simulate running more closely. Cycling doesn't produce the gravity stress (pounding) of running and therefore will not aggravate most injuries. ... As with running in the pool, simulate the long runs and speedwork on the cycle to gain increased benefit you need to add about 20%-40% more time to each session.

...so scale back cycling contribution using a factor of .7-.8 or so. About +1000mi/year for me.

The best way to improve your running is to run. However other types of exercise may benefit runners by improving performance, reducing injury risk, and helping them work through injuries without losing too much fitness. ... Alternative forms of cardiovascular exercise, such as bicycling can be useful when running is painful or impossible due to an injury. The best way to approach alternative cardiovascular exercise is to duplicate the planned running workouts you're missing as closely as possible in whichever alternative activity you choose. For example, if you had planned to do a 10-mile progression run with the last two miles at a moderate pace, instead do a 75 minute bike ride with the last 15 minutes at a moderate intensity.

...so it's equal? sort of? if it's not, shouldn't you pedal more? or it's the best you can do? maybe for cardiovascular anyway? +0-1300 mi/year for me.

All three reinforce the mF point that the tissue load just isn't there. All three reiterate that the best way to get specific improvement at running is to run and all three imply anyone on a bike is injured in some fashion, probably mentally. Hey, *I* agree with all of those - and it's not like I devote my precious training time to breast-stroking in the pool. With devoted time, I run and I only run. But I'm asking, for someone who has a fixed, mostly non-negotiable amount of background cross-training, how to account for that in training plans?

Two possible research directions (which came up in investigating this):

1. lazy triathletes.. They cycle.
2. And then maybe seeing if there are amateur cyclists running marathons in their off season while maintaining cycling-specific base or something. Or cross-training by occupation. Maybe bike couriers. But wouldn't any respectable bike courier be out alleycatting for fame and fans, not pounding pavement with a bunch of fanny-packed Chads around the Loop?

So, final analysis, I'm at about 1500 mi/year actual running, with a healthy boost for aerobic fitness, depending on who you ask.

Looking at Boston qualifiers, here's some survey data and analysis I earlier linked to, so that we can get an idea of how much qualifiers are running,

For mileage in the year before the race, there appears to be a fair amount of consistency across the responses. Almost no runners ran under 1,000 miles, and few run above 2,500. The average is the difficult, but not unreasonable, standard of 1,750 miles.

All the actual data is linked to in a spreadsheet, but taking the average of 1750 miles... Of course, I cannot emphasize enough how deplorably wrong, mathematically immoral, and rationally depraved it would be to compare myself to the average here. This is not an example of survivor bias. This is survivor filtering: we are only looking at the sample of qualifiers and have no information about the non-qualifying population; it would be as if you looked at the average income of ERE forum-posting early-retirees (47,000 USD. I made that up) and decided any Americans making $47,000 have a good shot of retiring early. It would be stupid, foolhardy, and bad.

So, for simplicity, comparing a yearly estimated total of 1500 mi/yr to the average Boston qualifier (1750 mi/year), I'm not far off. I'm 85% there. Is that enough? Add in 1000 miles for pedaling around on a bike and...

Well, at any rate, here's another: cross-training relevant bit from that series of analyses:

Interestingly, the third most popular was the low mileage Run Less, Run Faster / FIRST programs. With 7 respondents using the program, I’m not sure how statistically relevant it is, but it is worth noting that these runners ran significantly less than other respondents averaging only 1,220 miles in the year before their BQ, while respondents as a whole average more like 1,750. Three out of the four[sic] were also women.

FIRST is what I tried last year, a program which emphasizes cross-training and whose 3-day a week mileage is so low, even I bumped up the mid-range runs to be longer. I improved even with a poor base but I wasn't anywhere close to the qualifying times we're talking about here. And 1,220 miles sounds low. So low as just barely even be possible..

but, wait, you're saying it's possible?

[ebast]

In all the excitement, I have failed to post any run reports. Already the race is just about two months away and I'm up to around 45 mi/wk and long runs are at 17mi. My earlier frustrations with my base period-induced slow-slow-slowness have gone away.

Nose-breathing test: I've been surprised pleasantly that my baseline has improved from last years 8:30-8:45 min/mi to safely down toward 8:10-8:15 min/mi pretty comfortably. I may try a heart rate drift test next time I have a lazy long run to get a second read on this.

I am considering trying Slevin's Sweet Solution for the next few runs. I had been doing all my low intensity stuff under 12-14mi in a fasted (but caffeinated) state, as much for simplicity to get out the door as supposed fat-adaptation, but I see while appealing in theory, fasted training is currently controversial and probably not well-proven in the literature. So..forget that. Any possible fat-adaptation benefits I'd see are probably mostly in the bank this late in the game so I don't have any hesitations switching over to fueling every run and getting my fueling strategy and tolerances together. So gimme some of that sweet stuff.

Yes, it's come to this: shooting sugar packets swiped from the Denny's at the water fountain.

Web of Goals: monitored multiple patches resulting in consumption of several quarts of blackberries, snagged a charming vintage tin worth its weight in gold (filled with honey-jasmine tea biscuits, pressed into the right hands), scoped out two yard sales (sometimes they don't suspect joggers are early birds with an alibi).

[Scott 2]

@c40 - I know you had prior training, but doubling power output in 5 months is wild. I'm over here hoping to improve a couple percent per month. And often hurting myself in the process.

@ebast - the rehydration solution tastes kinda salty. I haven't tried to improve upon it yet, since I have a bunch of Nuun tablets. But I think part of the reason people make more complex DIY recipes is to cut that salty taste.


Meanwhile my own training hit a snag. I progressed too fast and irritated my knee. So the past two weeks have been reduced to moderate elliptical work. First 2 mile run today, 5k race in 9 days. I'll make it, but training needs to shift gears afterwards.

I had been managing (ignoring?) a little tendonitis in my right Achilles. I suspect that lead to some additional impact on the knee, eventually aggravating it. Lesson learned.

[jacob]

@c40 - I know you had prior training, but doubling power output in 5 months is wild.

It's a lot easier to recover "lost ground" than to capture it in the first place. I'm not sure why that is, but it's like the body somehow remembers.

[ebast]

Well, I tried this 'rehydration solution.' I couldn't believe you guys are drinking this stuff.

But then I added half a Meyer lemon, and it tasted.. not just tolerable, but tasty, thirst-quenching, almost sophisticated in the sense it might go well with a bit of gin and quinine, but that wasn't quite right either: it was more that I felt this strange urge to put on cleats and hit the fields at Combray.

And suddenly the memory revealed itself as I'd heard the story of something else designed "to give them water, but with salt in it to replace the salt they were losing in sweat. Also, give them sugar to keep their blood sugar up, but not so much sugar that it would upset their stomachs," which also tasted pretty horrid without a little citric acid:

By all accounts, the first batch tasted so bad none of the scientists could stomach it, but when Cade’s wife suggested adding lemon juice, the drink that would soon become known as Gatorade was born.

Well good. Reinvented that one.