The measure of a runner November 2
On October 19th 2007 I had a my lactate threshold and VO2max tested. To those that don’t want to click on those links, the lactate threshold measures the intensity of exercise I can do before my body can no longer process lactate before it starts building up (and causing me to feel fatigue). The VO2Max is the maximum rate my body can utilize oxygen. I had this test performed at the UF and Shand’s Sports Performance Center.
The test is pretty simple. They put me on a treadmill and have me wear a mask that measures my oxygen consumption. Every three minutes they prick a finger, take blood, and increase the speed of the treadmill by 0.5 mph. When I finally give up, the test is over. I thought I’d be all macho, but the treadmill only went up to 10 mph, so after that they had to simulate faster speeds by raising the slope of the treadmill, and I wimped out after about 1.5 minutes on the second inclined speed (simulated 11 mph).
The results of the test were that my VO2Max is 59.5 ml/min/kg. According to a chart I found, this puts me on the low end of track and field athletes. Moreover, VO2Max is only 20-30% trainable. So, I might not be able to increase that number very much (certainly getting to 85 seems to be out of the question).
The results of the lactate threshold test were somewhat better. The tester said that they would take the lactate theshold to be 4 mMol/L. For me, that occured at approximately 89% of my VO2max, which means, that even though my VO2Max is not that high, I can run at a very high percentage of my VO2Max. This implies I would be much more competitive at longer races, such as half or full marathons. According to the last paragraph of this page, my lactate threshold is at the level of elite endurance athletes.
There is a third metric called running economy. This is like fuel efficiency in your car: per unit mass, how far can you go on a unit of oxygen? My running economy is about 193 ml/kg/km. According to this page, my running economy is above average. Getting it into the 170 - 180 range would make it excellent. Running economy can be improved by training. Interestingly, I often do long runs at about 8.5 miles per hour (about 7 min/mile) and my economy is about 183 at that speed, which is very good, but still not excellent.
It seems the two areas I should focus on are running economy and VO2max. To do this, I plan to do more long runs at faster speeds. My lactate threshold is pretty high, so I should be able to do long runs at around 6 minutes per mile. Additionally I’ll be doing more interval training. I plan to do intervals of 4-5 minutes in length to make sure I’m stressing my VO2Max. Hopefully I can push up both of these two metrics.
Unfortunately, it seems I have a mild case of Piriformis syndrome, which is limiting my training right now. Hopefully I’ll recover soon and be back to training 100%.
Here are some plots:
Addendum 11/3/2007: Nova ran a program which you can view on their website: Nova Marathon Challenge. It covers about a dozen people going from a sedentary lifestyle to running the Boston marathon after about 9 months of preparation. The program discusses some of the physiology and metrics which I mentioned above.