Testing Time

We are going to a bit of a testing time in our household tomorrow. Or more particularly, my wife is. 

My wife has been running regularly for a while now. She started last April and while she has had a few off periods, and a bit of an injury for a while she has managed to maintain the habit more often than she hasn't. As a result she is now sustainably running 30 minutes or more, 3 times a week. It has been slow, but impressive progress.

Now that she has built a bit of a running base, the time has come for her to start introducing some variations in pace to her training, some threshold work and perhaps a bit of a tempo session. These variations in pace will help her work more of her energy systems and will help further drive improvements in running fitness and efficiency, in turn helping increase speed. 

But just how do we fine these pace zones for her. Well of course we can work on perceived effort, but for a new runnier like my wife it can be hard to know just what threshold should feel like, let alone tempo. Enter the need for a bit of testing. 

By running some simple testing it will be fairly straight forward to define my wife's pace zones. Once she has those pace zones defined she will know just what her target pace is for any one session, allowing her to bring pace variation into a session confident that she is working at approximately the right intensity. 

The test we are going to be using is what is known as a Cooper Test. In a Cooper Test you try and run as far as you can in 12 minutes. Front Runner often use a Critical Velocity Test based on 30 minutes which gives great pace predictions, however, with my wife still be quite new to running, a 30 minute critical velocity test is not realistic. A Cooper Test is much more manageable though and she is fit enough to run consistently for 12 minutes which means we are more likely to get an accurate result, whereas I suspect she would fade over 30 minutes. The shorter test means you aren't going working hard for quite as long, but it is still quite a tough test, that will require careful pacing. Going out too hard in a 12 minute test is just as bad as going out too hard in a 30 minute test, so my wife will meed to be careful. It will certainly be a solid morning out for her.

Once we have the results of the Cooper Test we pop the results into this page:

Front Runner Pace Zone Calculator

which gives nice clear guidance on pace zones. Once the pace zones are defined all that is left is to build a program using those values and then get out and start running.