Feelings

At Front Runners we like numbers, primarily we are big fans of numbers like running pace, cycling power, things like that. We have found over the years that for most athletes having a quantified number helps with the quality of training. We have found most people find it easier to target the correct intensity zone for a session if they have a quantified measure to help them as opposed to a descriptive direction such as 'run hard' or 'run easy'.

It isn't that we are anti perceived effort at Front Runner, we just find that for many athletes saying something like 8 out of 10 is still very open to interpretation (or mis-interpretation more correctly). For some athletes, particularly more experienced ones, these sorts of descriptions can work pretty well, but for newer athletes we find numbers are generally more accurate (assuming those numbers are based on good testing data).

There are some exceptions to the above though, one of which came up at the running session tonight.

We are now about 3 weeks from Busselton 70.3, which means many athletes are pretty deep into a hole of fatigue. They will start tapering their way out of those holes soon, but for now there are some tired legs around. In the case of tired legs, these pace zones start to be less useful. Sure an individual probably can hold their threshold pace, but with the added fatigue they are probably going to be working above threshold to do that. Working above threshold kind of defeats the purpose of the session.

What we discussed at training today is that a Threshold session should be about 8.5 or 9 out of 10, not 10 out of 10. If some cumulative fatigue means that their normal Threshold pace feels harder than 9 out of 10 then they are better off slowing down. Threshold sessions get their benefit from training at or slightly below the anaerobic threshold, not above. Most athletes struggle with the idea that slowing down can actually be the best thing for improving the quality of the session, but this is one case where that can be true.

Sometimes numbers aren't king.