Lactate follow-up #2

A reader recently posted a comment/question regarding lactate training that I thought would be good to answer as a post. It brings up a good point that could use some clarity. 

"Brian, I was browsing through Mark Twight's Extreme Alpinism book the other day and was reading up on his lactate training section. In it, he recommends keeping the rest period low (30-60s) to prevent full recovery. I've also heard that same thing that you mentioned above about threshold training, which is to fully recover between intervals. Obviously, neither one is always the right scenario, but I was curious if you favor one over the other?"

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Crank it up!

I spend a lot of time in these pages talking about base and volume and the critical adaptations we get from both. Recently, I went to the other end of the spectrum and covered some ideas on power endurance and lactate tolerance. Admittedly, the amount of time you spend both training and racing on the former is large and, on the latter, small. In the middle, lies a critical zone of intensity which is probably where the real selection in races is made. We don't spend a ton of time here when competing but it often represents the most decisive zone in which we operate in a race. In a word, it's called THRESHOLD. This is what you exceed when you blow trying to hang with the leaders on a climb. In a ski mountaineering race, your threshold either keeps you in the hunt on the climbs or you watch the top placings move away from you up the skin track. In a cycling time trial, threshold is where you try to spend 99% of the race. God, do we ever hear a lot about this these days.

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Lactate Tolerance feedback follow-up

A couple of readers submitted comments regarding the last post on lactate training. As I was responding, my comments were getting verbose (big surprise) so I thought I would create another post with them in case others find the dialogue helpful...

Hi Brian, another really great read and for me, some food for thought as to prep for next season. I have to say that so far this year that I have held my own and been happy with the up's but suffered and lost time on downs. Don't know what the courses are like in North America, but here in the Alpes some of the down hill is like the dark side of the moon!

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Lactate Tolerance

As this week's post comes to print you'll have to admit I'm getting better at cranking them out. I feel good about it. This post on training certainly raises the bar for length and probably could be divided into three different pieces. But it was written in a multi-day stream of consciousness that I will keep together. Hope it works for you...

Okay, enough ranting and excuse making. Time to spend a post talking training! And not just any type of training, either. This is some of my favorite type. The kind spent in the weight room getting stronger. Because, let's face it, endurance athletes are some of the weakest people on the planet when compared to athletes who spend at least part of their training time pushing iron around. Greg Glassman and his cronies at CrossFit love to point out the fact that endurance types are pathetically weak. When Outside Magazine comes out with a cover story on the "Fittest Man on Earth", it's invariably a long distance athlete of some sort. Glassman just scoffs at the notion.

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Targhee Rando Race Beatdown!

OUCH!

Okay, the fact that last weekend's ski mountaineering race hurt in all the usual ways is no surprise. I mean, let's face it. There are few endurance competitions that punish participants quite like ski mountaineering racing. A friend of mine who is a solid mountain bike racer did his first skimo event at Targhee. When he came into the lodge after finishing looking a bit shattered but still displaying the masochistic grin of someone who got even more than he came for, I quipped that it was a lot like mountain bike racing. He simply said, "Harder!" He pointed out that with the hair raising descents on tooth picks and the ski boot equivalent of bed room slippers there was just no recovery. Another competitor was overheard saying he hit his max heart rate on a descent. How awesome is that?!

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