Awhile ago I decided that if I was going to focus my valuable time and energy on running, I was going to get the most that I could out of it. IMHO, the best way to do that is to understand my strengths and weaknesses, and then train to exploit the former and improve the latter. But how to do that?
Last November I had my first physiological performance evaluation, which exposed my biggest physiological weakness: my system switches over from burning fat (good fuel) to burning glucose (bad fuel) way too soon in my aerobic range: at way too low a heart rate, and way too slow a speed. Since November I’ve been focusig my training on improving the capacity of my slow-twitch muscle fibers to burn fat for fuel, which means I’ve been running at a very specific heart rate for most of my runs.
Three weeks ago I went in for updated testing and was very pleased to learn that I showed really good improvement in this area despite a 7 lb weight gain (thank you company cafeteria). Had I not gained 7 lbs my improvement would have been even better.
Based on these most recent test results I now have two training targets. I still need to spend most of my time training in the (slow) zone that addresses fat-burning, but I also need to improve my system’s ability to cope with lactic acid at higher intensities by increasing my lactate threshold, which means building some higher intensity workouts into the plan as well.
There was one area in which I did not improve, and that is how much glycogen was stored in my system. Last time around my glycogen stores were not great, and this time the number was even worse. Because of my weight gain I’d been anticipating that my glycogen stores would be better and was surprised to see that they were not. I learned that injured muscles can’t store glycogen, and I’ve definitely got something going on with my right leg, so that might be contributing to the problem.
All in all I’m pretty happy with the test results and I’m looking forward to the upcoming training cycle.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Physiology
