V02 Max Challenge

[NewBlood]

Scott2, how are your feet doing? I hope you've found some relief.

ebast, how are you doing on your 2024 goals?

[Scott 2]

Scott2, how are your feet doing? I hope you've found some relief

I got a 2nd opinion on my feet, who said the tumor was congenital and of no concern. He said running was cool, but to do PT and use orthotics. Primary reason was to slow progression of bunions and arthritis. I got rocker shoes to reduce demand on big toe mobility.

All that and built up to a couple 3 mile runs, but the magic is absent. My weight is up about 10%, which precludes setting PRs. I backed way off when some contracting started, found my insulin resistance acting up, and so returned to a little higher volume of cardio.

Planned activity volume is 3-4h of zone 2. Mostly the elliptical. I might rotate in my bike, rower or weight vest - once or twice a week. Yoga class 2-3x a week, moderate lifting 3-4x a week.

The Garmin estimates my v02 max at 46, so about 90% of peak. It's been about 8 months since I've tested. I think the Garmin is fairly reliable though.

The arthritis from the bunions is a problem. It feels worse when I wear the orthotics, so I tend not to. I roll my feet on lacrosse balls all the time. I have Dyna discs, half foam rollers, balance pads and a slack block floating around my house. Keeping my ankles mobile and strong reduces load on the arthritic toes.

Long term, bunion surgery seems likely. My toe is currently the most painful part of my body. I've got a backlog of higher priority problems though - jaw, eye. Insurance has been difficult. That also also impairs my training enthusiasm.

[NewBlood]

Oof glad to hear the tumor is not a concern. The bunion sounds really annoying...
Good luck with all the insurance headaches, it's great that you're taking care of all these issues one by one.

[ebast]

Weekly Mileage: 31mi (run) / 23mi (bike) (YTD: 531 run / 1225 bike)
Long Run:12mi

I apologize as I am running a little behind here, not exactly the most promising trait given my goal is to run a marathon, fast.

(For anyone just joining, each year I try to take advantage of ERE lifestyle factors to run a marathon fast enough to qualify for Boston... and fail a little less.) Running a little late on updates,.. 7 weeks in on training already as I've been dealing with a number of canonical life and work challenges which give me a new & exciting spin: training when priority-wise it's not even in your top 5.

I mean, we all see people who must be rich or something because they look like they spend 4 hours at the gym each day, and if I look honestly (at my revealed precedence), running has frequently enjoyed status as priority #2, some weeks, #1. But Gandhi has famously (not) said that a society should be judged by how it treats its poorest members and so maybe an individual should be judged by how they treat their poorest priorities.

Back to running.

How it went by (fast)
Off-season was a jangly mess trying to incorporate swimming into a 3 day a week, 4ish hour tight schedule. Never got much above 1000m trying to run-swim-run, and in the process spent most of my interval work in the water, not on maintaining running speed. 4 hours a week really isn't enough to meet all the desires here, but more on that next winter.

That said, I did meet my goal to maintain a medium-longish run every week of 12-16mi and I did keep up with hill sprints once a week or so.

How it's going (slow)
...with obvious results that, as I hope to ramp up ultimately to 6-7hrs/week, I could happily run 15 miles tomorrow, but it'd be 9:30's all the way. Slow slow slow. This is what it felt like last year. I can speed up a bit but as soon as my mind wanders, I relax to this easy default zone 1-2 pace. I question if I have been looking at the off-season precisely backwards: I have been treating it as a time to not worry about pace and try some interesting trail runs or integrate with other activities or explore new areas. But in the off-season, I have such precious little mileage, maybe that's exactly the time I should be a stickler for demanding workouts and paradoxically leave the training season for fun time, as professional triathelete and coach Chris Hauth praises before citing Heraclitus:

"I've noticed it for myself but a lot of the athletes that I coach: if they have certain numbers or times in mind, whether it's an Ironman or other events that are measured, and they don't achieve it - that frustration just grows... And those that love the activity, the fitness, the health benefits, the joy of doing it, the outdoors, all the adventure with it, those seem to progress naturally. And they're not outcome-driven, they're process driven."

and so amongst the paced work, I can pick any of my ample mileage-building easy runs during training as opportunities to ditch the pace clock and enjoy the intrinsic pleasures of experiencing dawn, the joy of the outdoors running through fields of stinging nettle, the adventure of snagging a breakfast burrito mid-run.

[ebast]

Weekly Mileage: +31mi run (561mi ytd) / +25mi bike (1250mi ytd)
Long Run: 11 mi [shortish but with 5 mi of Fartlek, 90s on/off @7:00 pace]

I have wanted to regularly try out different training styles (and plans) and would like each year to go deep with a new book or training plan. I see it as a way to avoid Mt. Stupid of reading a bunch of running books and coming back with a lingustic equivalent of throwing my hands up in the air ("They all basically say the same thing." / "Nobody can agree on anything") and picking the easiest one. I figure by picking a new approach each year or so and trying <an adapted version of it>, I'll get a gritty, granular feel for the differences and maybe figure out what works best for me.


I didn't do it. Not this year. Absorbing and adapting an existing plan/style to my paces, training goals, and calendar takes 10-12 hours, I was time-limited and pressured at the start of the season and in a bit of a fluster to get running. so I jsut dusted off my spreadsheet,pecked in the Boston qualifying pace.. then had to review its impact on all the various training paces, spend a couple hours moving my long-run day due to scheduling concerns, working around travel and new schedule problems, and finally review and nudge workouts to avoid any weeks with (injury-prone) >10% increases in total mileage. And pressed "Print".

So this year I am using a comfortable training plan adjusted to my constrained 3-4 session/week schedule based on one from Brad Hudson's book, "Run Faster". He's known for pushing targeted and "adaptive training": not using spreadsheets ( "I don’t really believe in writing schedules," he says. "It never really works; it never comes out."). He recommends penciling in your workouts and adjusting based on capability that day as well as informed by your progress that season, all of which I would like to actually do. He is also known for hill sprints. Hill sprints?

(apologies to our hale Chicago & Environs readers who may not be familiar with this concept of "hill"s. Maybe y'all can just run to-wind.)

If you have never done a steep hill sprint before, you should not leap into a set of 10 steep hill sprints the very first time you try them, especially if you are over age 30. These efforts place a tremendous amount of stress on the muscles and connective tissues. Thus, the beginner is at some risk of suffering a muscle or tendon strain or another such acute injury when performing steep hill sprints. Once your legs have adapted to the stress that steep hill sprints impose, this workout actually protects against injury. But you must proceed with caution until you get over the hump of these early adaptations."

The whole point of steep hill sprints is to demand a truly maximal-power effort. For this reason, they should be very short. Your first session, performed after completion of an easy run, should consist of just one or two 8-second sprints on a steep gradient of approximately 6 to 8 percent.

(A lot of attention deservedly given to the disclaimer. Don't get injured. Now the workout details, and I should note he says he attributes his approach to famed Italian coach Renato Canova who got them from American sprinting coach Bud James.)

Your first session will stimulate physiological adaptations that serve to better protect your muscles and connective tissues from damage in your next session. [...]

Thanks to the repeated bout effect, you can increase your steep hill sprint training fairly rapidly and thereby develop stride power quickly. First, increase the number of 8-second sprints you perform by one or two per session per week. Once you're doing 8 to 10 sprints you may move to 10-second sprints and a slightly steeper hill. After a few more weeks you may advance to 12-second sprints on a 10-percent gradient, if you feel the need to further increase your stride power. Always allow yourself the opportunity to recover fully between individual sprints within a session[...] Simply walking back down the hill you just ran up should do the trick, but if you need more time, take it.

and, progression...

Most runners will achieve as much strength and power improvement as they can get by doing 10 to 12 hill sprints of 10 to 12 seconds each, twice a week. Once you have reached this level and have stopped gaining strength and power, you can cut back to one set of 6 to 10 hill sprints per week. This level of maximal power training will suffice to maintain your gains through the remainder of the training cycle.

Who else is known for hill sprints? Kilian Jornet. Here is Uphill Athlete on hill sprints where I should note there are some milder versions (probably for road runners) on the website, but I will use the more detailed version from the book:

Use a 30-percent grade hill or steep stairs. Steeper is generally better for building strength and power, but hills over 50 percent can be hard to maintain traction on... Follow the long warm-up procedure [...] to avoid injury. If you are inexperienced with this type of sprint training, ease into this program by starting the workouts at 80-85 percent of maximum effort and slowly increasing the output during the repetitions for the first two to three workouts. Injury is a real risk when using this program.

Here's the core exercise:

Warm-up: (20 minutes warmup to 2-3 minutes Z3, dynamic stretching, 30s medium-hard hill run, 2x20s skipping uphill)

Workout:
Once you feel well warmed up and have no pain, you are ready to begin the main work
1. Execute 6-8x10 sec of maximum power bounding with a long stride or running sprints. Take a two-minute easy downhill walk as recovery between sprints and a three minute rest between sets when and if you increase the number of repetitions beyond eight.

2. Twenty minutes easy jog cool down.

Here's the progression:

1. You will progress by adding more repetitions to the workout. Do not increase the length of the repetitions beyond ten seconds.
2. If you are new to this form of training be cautious. As mentioned above, this is a potentially injury-causing workout. Start with using 90-95 percent of maximum force. Only add force after you have handled two to three of these workouts with no problem.
3. Add no more than two repetitions per week to the total volume

Ok whoa. They agree on a lot, but some differences in Run Faster (RF) vs Uphill Athlete (UA):

• Grade: 6-8% grade, scaling up to 10% (RF) / 30%, maybe 50% grade (UA)
• Reps: 1-2, progressing in increments of 1-2 to 10-12 (RF) / 6-2x8, stop if it hurts (UA)
• Duration 8 sec, progressing to 12 (RF) / 10 sec (UA)
• Rest maybe 1:30 minutes / 2:00 minutes
• Progression: Init start with 1 rep, maybe 2. (RF) / do all 6, but at 80-85% (or 90-95%?) effort (UA)
• Progression: Volume +1-2 a workout / +2 a week
• Progression: Max 12 / 2x8
• Periodization: "Introductory" period, maintain during "fundamental" (RF) / "base" period (UA) [different naming but UA basically matches RF]
• Warmup: easy run (RF) / easy-to-medium progression run, dynamic stretching, running/skipping uphill (UA)

I appreciate the baby steps from Brad (RF), really gently easing you into this, while Kilian mostly drops you in the deep end but with a nice focus on adequate warm up and specific stretching. But this is generally more evidence why I tend to put Kilian Jornet's "Uphill Athlete" on the shelf with books like Arnold Schwarzenegger's on bodybuilding or Bruce Lee's on martial arts or Jacob Fisker's on early retirement, all of which contain myriad useful techniques and advice but are each written by unusual or abnormal individuals with super-human powers of muscle-building or martial cunning or retiring, I mean it's like if Peter Parker wrote a book on balance, leaping, and wall climbing, ("Parker on Parkour") and is detailing tactics on three or four finger holds for scaling brick versus concrete walls but not mentioning the minor fact he was bit by a RADIOACTIVE SPIDER. STEP ZERO: MAYBE GET BIT BY A RADIOACTIVE SPIDER!!

I mean, Uphill Athlete is pretty upfront that it assumes an experienced reader as quite a number of the recommendations prerequisite two years of base training, so much so that I still don't consider myself in condition to follow it very often. As to kicking off hill sprints though, they both emphasize the dangers of injury (if you're new to this stuff you might think goal #1 is to run fast but people that do this stuff seem to always say the most important thing is: don't get injured - so you can keep training.)

What a difference, though, in starting off with 1 hill sprint at 6% grade for 8 sec vs. 6 sprints up 30% grade at 80-90% effort. What a difference..

It's an instance where I wish there was a better culture of citing or evidence-based recommendation. Where did these parameters and rules-of-thumb for progression come from? Because people you trained got hurt when they tried doing more? Because when people did less it didn't work? Because that's how you learned it? Because that's how everyone does it? Some application of some training theory? Some ratio of some 10-week randomized control study? Because you made it up right now ('Uh, this is hard for you? Ok just go 85%')? I wish each sentence in any training book were a different color based on the sort of justification. Not that the justification has to be great, "hey it worked for me," may be a n of 1, but one is more than none and we're upfront about it.

It kinda seems like maybe Brad has seen a bunch of runners getting hurt so went way cautious on the start whereas I get the sense Kilian has been doing hill sprints since he was 3, what's the big deal?

For people wanting to get into hill sprints you can decide what sort of approach you think is best. Which is better than me because I didn't realize there were options and got lucky doing what were effectively 2 hill sprints a workout by accident because two uphills overlapped with some 200m intervals I did in the FIRST plan. The next year I discovered Uphill Athlete's recipe which I applied verbatim and after that I discovered Brad Hudson's approach.


But I have another question? Why are we doing these again?

Look at what these things are. I mean energetically, obviously this is the anaerobic realm, but what are we trying to get in terms of muscular response? Hudson talks a lot about power, but really? Just to deploy a little Cunningham's Law here, and I should say for anyone that actually knows about weight training, you are about to realize you are in the VO2-max thread by horrible mistake, but what is the goal here? Hudson says that hill sprints "strengthen all of the running muscles" and that they "increase the power and efficiency of your stride" and frequently mentions increasing your "stride power".

Definitely following the Brad Hudson version, I don't think you are training to failure or even getting that close to it: the duration is capped, there's not much he gives you to increase the load (grade 6 to 10%, no added weight) and my understanding when it comes to resistance training is that if not to failure you want to be close to get anything like power gains. And the reps are HIGH - we're running 40m here. (Similar issues for hypertrophy which is definitely not the goal here). Is this muscular endurance? That seems to be how Uphill Athlete couches it explicitly, and they do provide suggestions around increasing load by adding weight as well as substantial increases to grade (30 to 50%). (UA also has a separate section on strength improvement with squats and things.) Hudson's Run Faster approach is interesting in that he doesn't recommend increasing the grade too much or adding weight after it stops stimulating adaptation, and basically says just maintain what you have at that point. So it's like it's this fixed body-weight specific-boost, not something to keep training stronger throughout a season. Uphill Athlete seems to do a better job by having more wide-ranging options via weight, grade, and reps of making sure it's increasing training stimulus but it's also for early stages of training only ("This is definitely not a type of training that should be included in all phases of training").

So is that it? A little fundamental muscular endurance training? But I'm a little curious as to why's that necessary when this is within training programs which simultaneously include longer intense uphill runs, say 1-2 mi uphill after a medium workouts - those hurt. You'd think that would be stressing muscular endurance, no? Why do you need the sprints? So I guess the sprinting aspect makes me think maybe this is some kind of explosive power thing? (even if they don't exactly say so.)

Take two identical twins and the endurance athlete may have 90% slow-twitch muscle fibers in his legs versus 50% in his brother. Could this just be a way, amidst the overwhelming volume of endurance training, to encourage keeping a little fast-twitch muscle around for when you need it?

[ebast]

Weekly Mileage: +18mi run (579mi) / +0mi bike (1250mi)
Long Run: 10mi. and it was slooooow..

Run Report (no Hill Sprints here, I promise):

I follow a quick rule and two corollaries: listen to the unit of the first attribute somebody tells you about their home: whether it's (neighborhood/square feet/acres/foot)*, and you'll know if they're from the City, the `burbs, the Country, or the docks, and I always use Corollaries I: by the way, they're bragging (act impressed) and II: if they mention more than one, they must be a realtor. So here is a run report from the `burbs, and to be specific the gated development burbs. (this matters).

* if you ever leave the U.S., use these: (barony/m^2/hectares/metres)

Due to a work trip addressing a specific population, I'm finding myself among the Late Retirement Unextreme crowd here in Sunny, Subtropical Retirement Land. It is hot. 90 degrees. (32 C for you baronets). And the humidity is higher.. I am used to running in cool mornings back home and in my first bout of trying to run 3 mile intervals at 7:00, I finished precisely one, experienced something close to heat-death, and gave up.

I've ended up running along the large grids of boulevard highways that direct traffic to entrances to the subdivisions of each giant almost mile-square block. It is flat, and until I got to the nice bits, most of the view is on one side of traffic and on the other, subdivision privacy wall. Some gated community walls are white, while others are more of a beige. Some have mock mortar-lines or may even be painted cinderblock while others are stucco style. Some allow you to see just over to backyards and peek at a few feet below the eaves of the houses behind while others cover all but the roofs. I get it; it's necessary as this mode of development violates the timeless vernacular of having a building face its most trafficked road as how can you? The layout is designed to move traffic efficiently: you can't put a bunch of driveways onto the boulevard and nobody wants the road noise anyway, so make the houses face inward on twisty subdivision ways and curly cul-de-sacs, but that means your backyard's facing the road everybody takes to get to the Publix... and.. you don't want half the town and random joggers peeking into your backyard, so build up the wall!

It does not, however, make for the most exciting running and just to rub salt in your eyes, some of the developers noticing the affront of 3/4 mile of beige wall decided they'd perk it up a bit with a bucolic touch by: winding the sidewalk in graceful & pointless arcs, which if you ever found yourself on foot or bike not to add a charming bit of human-scale life like some hay-forking peasant in a Monet, but instead actually trying to get somewhere...


I know we have a number of important contributors on the forum from this region and should point out this is as much my fault for not knowing where to run and not being adapted to the climate, not to mention I definitely have sympathy as I spent some formative times myself on the American Gulf Coast (well not really; it was Texas), and I appreciate that you can adapt somewhat to the weather, but man, to adjust for anyone running in this stuff, I am subtracting a minute off your mile pace, three miles off your required weekly long run and only eight points off your IQ for living in such a infernal and humid exerciser's hell.

I mean, it matters. Even here most of the natives warned me to stay inside and the people I interact with mostly follow a practice of hunkering down (in AC) for the summer which I gather is five to eight months long. This has predictable, observable impacts on VO2 max and BMI which have their own regions of robust correlation with lifespan and I'm afraid in that regard at least on average this is no blue zone, or even more, where @Ego points out "the millions of tiny things" that go into helping someone live to be a nonagen- or centen-arian, I feel like I am witnessing the ones that prevent them. (despite the fact everybody moves here to be old).

[to paraphrase the (erm.. late) Charlie Munger: All I want to know is where they only live to be 76 so I'll never go there.]

Take one aspect--the physical activity aspect of blue zones--and I think of rustic mountain paths or rickety stairsteps you're forced to traverse in some storybook image I have of daily life and while it's true that is purposefully erased from these environments, I would like to call attention to "adding insult to injury" or that indomitable quality of the human spirit that when given a Twinkie, decides: "you know, I think I oughta deep-fry this." Because it's not just that life with the z-dimension removed reduces aerobic & anaerobic effort, balancing & flexibility, fast muscular reaction...after you move to where the walking is easier, you decide "you know, I think I oughta get a golf cart." Or e-bike or scooter, as beside lower base physical fitness demands, wheeled vehicles are managed easier in flat regions and negotiate the greater distances associated with living in two dimensions. I'd say something like 40% of the people I passed on the path were electrified.

But not all. Even when I Mad-Dogged and Englishmanned it to do a medium run around noon due to scheduling, there were a few slow joggers who showed me how to take it cool. There were still casual bikers getting themselves out there. In the parks there were birds of tropical dimensions gabbling in the lagoons and pecking about around impenetrable palm stands. And in some magic of the South, I saw a guy three hundred feet ahead of me drop a line in the water and effortlessly pull out a fish before I even got there.

(It was a long time before I got there.)

After all, I'm running up to 90 seconds slower per mile. Just to add something generally useful, or at least quantitative or objective, here is Jeff Daniels on the effects of heat on running speed. He has a table for 2:15 marathon, presumably because you control by using elite runners, but I don't even know how to think about that right now so I'm going to linearly scale it all to a base 4:00 marathon which seems about as unreachable in this weather (I am reporting the same fluid loss/min although I bet that's overestimated given the lower power output - the relative increase should be informative):

Temp (F/C) | Total Time(scaled from 2:25 to 4:00 marathon) | Approx fluid loss per min

55 / 13 | 4:00 | 13.0 mL
60 / 16 | 4:02 | 14.5 mL
65 / 18 | 4:04 | 15.7 mL
70 / 21 | 4:05 | 16.9 mL
75 / 24 | 4:07 | 18.1 mL
80 / 27 | 4:09 | 19.4 mL
85 / 29 | 4:11 | 20.7 mL
90 / 32 | 4:13 | 27.5 mL

This is likely an underestimate as it does not separate out for humidity and also this is for runners who were presumably trained for and adapted to the heat and they'd be losing from 55 to 90 degrees almost a quarter of an hour, that is you're running a 8:30 min/mi instead of 8:00 min/mi. You can also see that fluid needs roughly double. Heat's no joke.

For anyone actually planning accordingly, he also recommends 10 to 14 days acclimatization period for hotter & more humid environments.

[NewBlood]

Thanks for your updates ebast!

This one is hilarious. It does sound hell-ish, I can't believe you managed a run at noon there!

Good luck with your training and the "canonical life and work challenges". and now the hellish tropical humid heat.

ETA: I love your writing style.