Aerobic and base training are king says the Uphill Athlete. As do many other books, but this one explains better than any other I’ve seen why and how the aerobic threshold (AeT) changes with training.
The authors do give some methods for finding your AeT in the book, but you’ll find their most practical test on their website: Uphill Athlete heart drift test for finding AeT.
I winced and thought about throwing the book in the bin when I saw they cited Phil Maffetone’s hit-and-miss MAF method.
I read Maffetone’s book years ago and bought his low-HR story hook, line and sinker. This against my better judgement.
How could his one-size-fits-all formula of 180-age for finding your AeT fit all runners? Knowing, as I did, how variable heart rate can be from one person to another.
But as a fervent disciple of the Maff, I put my blinkers on and did at six months of MAF training and MAF training only (no intensity), only to find my fitness and performance drop off a cliff.
Maff’s argument made sense to me — he is a persuasive creature — but his methods didn’t work for me.
Now, all these years later and thanks to the Uphill Athlete, I know why.
It was of course because of the highly individualised nature of the AeT. Mine must have been, as it is now, a fair bit higher than the magical MAF number, and I was undertraining.
This wasn’t helped by me following Maff’s other tenet of not doing any hard running — or anything else bar MAF runs.
If I’d done also run hard occasionally, I wouldn’t have been so undertrained. I did actually get fitter when I did some races.
Anyway, the Uphill Athlete is crystal clear on how and why you should run mainly easy.
To be fair to Maff, he isn’t the only one giving out blanket methods for finding your AeT (top of zone 2). Just about every other book or zone system calculates it off either your lactate threshold or your maximum heartrate. No-one tries to pinpoint the AeT as sharply as the Uphill Athlete.
As well as telling us how to find the AeT and how individual it is, the Uphill Athlete drives home the message that it moves with training.
If you are aerobically deficient, something you discover by doing AeT and lactate threshold (AnT) tests, your AeT will be much lower than your AnT. When you get fitter, your AeT will rise and this gap will close.
In practice, it may not matter that much if you just follow the often touted advice to run easy a lot.
If you’re aerobically deficient and run easy, you’ll be running in zone 2 most of the time. This, according to the book, will raise your AeT over time and make you less deficient.
If you’re not aerobically deficient and run easy, you’ll be running in zone 1 most of the time. Something, again according to the book, you should be doing to maintain your AeT or raise it further.
But it’s good to know where you sit on the scale of aerobic deficiency as you can see if you’re training is working. You’ll also know when you should do more intensity (zone 2 or 3).
Other interesting points from the book:
- specific, mainly higher rep strength training is favoured over the lower rep general exercises (e.g. squats and deadlifts) often recommended
- distinction between category 1 and 2 athletes. Category 2 athletes averaging over 400 hours of foot-borne training a year plus some other things
- non-impact cross training only for recovery (foot-borne training rules!)
- proponents of doing a lot of vert (as a opposed to not doing too much to not get slow as talked about in this post)*
- weekly long runs of a higher percentage of weekly mileage than often suggested*
- fantastic photos and athlete stories
* probably due to the authors having mountaineering backgrounds as opposed to other books by mainly runners
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