That’s why David Roche, a running coach in Boulder, Colorado, two-time USATF trail 10K national champion, and coauthor of The Happy Runner: Love the Process, Get Faster, Run Longer, takes a custom approach to heart-rate training with his athletes.
Back in 2016, he was training Megan Roche, 31—now a five-time USATF trail national champion in events ranging from 10K to 50K and David’s wife— while she was in medical school. Megan often had to wake up as early as 3 a.m. to get her runs in before rotations. These early morning efforts started to wear her down. The easy days felt hard, and she wasn’t recovering well.
IT’S NOT THAT MOST HEART-RATE-BASED TRAINING PROGRAMS ARE WRONG, IT’S JUST THAT THEY PROBABLY AREN’T RIGHT FOR YOU.
David suggested they dial in her training by following her heart rate, but rather than using the typical age-based equations to map out her heart-rate zones—like 220 minus age for a max heart rate—he had Megan run a field test to find her lactate threshold and use that as her guide for workout intensity. This threshold is the level at which the intensity of exercise causes lactate to accumulate in the blood at a faster rate than it can be removed, making it the border between low- and high-intensity work. Your lactate-threshold heart rate is a better baseline than your max heart rate, which is used in other methods, says Roche, because two runners with the same maximum heart rate can have widely dissimilar lactate thresholds due to genetic or training differences.
This story is from the Issue 4, 2021 edition of Runner's World.
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This story is from the Issue 4, 2021 edition of Runner's World.
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