All Stressed Up And Nowhere To Go

Ever have one of those mornings when you didn't feel like getting out of bed for the morning run? You talk yourself out of bed and into the morning pre-run ritual. You might even muffle the little voice in your head long enough to step out the door. Maybe you get a mile up the road before SOMETHING finally clicks in your head and you receive the urgent message. You know the one:

What. Are. You. Thinking?

There are mornings, sometimes days, when our body tries to inform us it hasn't completely recovered from the stress of days past, which may or may not include our training. A heart rate monitor is an inexpensive tool to determine or predict whether we've endured a little too much stress.

I've used a heart rate monitor as part of my training for the past six or seven years. It's a simple tool to figure out your resting heart rate first thing in the morning. Some folks like to use the monitor to maintain their run pace. The heart rate monitor can also be used to help quantify a workout effort.

An athlete's resting heart rate can show the progression of fitness, as well as the onset of overreaching (not so good) or overtraining (not good at all). Some will place the heart rate strap when they go to bed, then turn on the heart rate receiver for a minute after waking up. Once the athlete learns their average heart rate, those mornings when sudden spikes of five-or-more beats-per-minute are read can tell the athlete about residual stress, or that the body has not completely recovered.

A resting heart rate can also be checked just as easily by placing a finger on the carotid artery and counting the pulses for a minute, but machines are more likely to be honest than human beings about the numbers.

I know folks who like to pace their runs based on a target heart rate zone. I prefer to go by feel than by heart rate for a number of reasons:

First, the heart is a demand pump. The oxygenated blood is sent to the places the body informs the brain it is most needed. That means there's a lag time between an effort is performed by the muscles and when the blood arrives to replenish the muscles...kind of the reverse of the way our automobile's carburetor works.

Second, depending on hydration (or dehydration), weather conditions, fitness, etc., a particular pace effort can vary in heart rate. A six-minute-per-mile pace is not always going to equate to a 145 beat-per-minute rate, just to give an example.

Ever ask someone how difficult a particular workout was? How do they usually describe it?

Dr. Eric Bannister researched training impact, scoring by percentage of maximum heart rate, multiplied by duration. Each ten percent above the fiftieth percentile earns a single point for each minute of effort. So a sixty-minute run at fifty percent of max heart rate would be a training impact score of sixty. That same sixty minutes at sixty percent max heart rate would score 120, a 180 training impact score would be seventy percent max for sixty minutes, and so on. Most good heart rate monitors have a function which informs the user how long their effort was in a particular range, or provides the average heart rate for the workout period.

Bannister and others also researched whether the Borg (perceived effort) scale of one-to-ten could be used to score training stress. They found most experienced athletes scored their perceived effort almost as accurately without a heart rate monitor; an athlete who scored their workout as a six-out-of-ten was found to have had exercised at around sixty percent of maximal heart rate. So you don't necessarily have to use a heart rate monitor, but you can get deeper into the details with one on your wrist/chest.

Once the workout is scored, the question soon follows as to what that score means to the individual.

Hunter Allen, one of the developers of the Training Peaks workout software, in a recent article, correlated training stress scores to levels of stress and need for recovery. He wrote that scores of:

- less than 150 = low stress. Recovery from this effort is generally complete by the following day.

- 150-to-300 = medium stress. Some residual fatigue. Generally complete recovery by the second day after the workout.

- 300-to-450 = high stress. Residual fatigue remains even after two days.

- more than 450 = very high stress. Residual fatigue over the next several days is likely.

While it's important to know how hard we run or work out, it's more important to realize gains in strength, speed, endurance and overall fitness come as we allow our body to properly recover from the effort. Once we completely recover we can go out and repeat the stress again, which makes our body more resistant to that same level of stress.

Recovery Is Underrated

"Recovery. That's the name of the game... Whoever recovers the fastest wins." - Lance Armstrong
Locals haven't seen a lot of me lately; some assume it's because I'm injured or quit running/racing altogether. Nothing is further from the truth. I'm spending more time doing something I could have done better in the past. In order to perform well at my goal events this autumn I'm spending more time on the treadmill, on the elliptical trainer, on the bike, in the pool and - believe it or not - easier efforts on the road. It isn't as fun as road racing. You don't get any awards for doing base training. Maybe that's why it's so overlooked. However, this isn't about me as much as it is about you.

If you participated in every area race since the beginning of the year (Here in Pensacola the first race is not long after New Years' Day, goes until early May, then stops over the summer. Racing then resumes in earnest around the middle of September & reaches it's crescendo right before Thanksgiving.) it might be too late to talk about whether it is time to recover; that time might have been long past. While hard work - long runs, speed work, tempo runs, terrain/event-specific workouts - are important, what is more important (I'm reminded by reading the thoughts of coaches & physiologists) is what Alan Couzens calls "the intelligent distribution of work."The first time we encounter a particular stress during training (say, a workout of 800 meters four times, with 100 meters walk recovery, at "up-tempo fresh" pace) our body becomes alarmed at the assault. Once the body adapts to that stress it compensates to deal with it, making you more fit...for a time. However, extended exposure to the same stress (say, due to a lack of variety) eventually leads to exhausting adaptation; you could end up worse off than when you first started doing that particular workout. That's what makes a variety of training stressors important. The same (4 x 800 in this case) workout that provided a 100% performance benefit at New Years', if done without any change, would provide, if you’re lucky, only a 3% benefit by Memorial Day.A season of hard training - or racing - that is too long leads to a performance plateau, or to fatigue. If you don't ration your efforts wisely over time, you can expect a relative plateau after three months & a decline in performance in five. Backing off the efforts by 1/3 of the normal volume one week each month, & one month each year won't hinder performance a bit.Each athlete needs to know the best length of training period, volume of training, & intensity of training for their goal. This means taking time to quantify not only how far/fast you went, but how intense it felt, & how you felt during the next workout period. You can do this by Borg (perceived effort) scale, average heart rate during the workout, resting heart rate each morning, hours of sleep, relative fatigue...I think you get the picture.Recovery, as the smart people say, is underrated.

A Matter of Quality

The other week, I came out to the track at five minutes before the start of practice and found a team member jogging laps. Rather than be pleased at their motivation to start early, I was a little less than happy. ‘You’re not going to need those junk miles,’ I said, ‘do you know what I have planned for this workout?’ It’s not so much that I wanted to be authoritarian; I looked at conditions and adjusted my plan accordingly…in this particular case, I moved the warm-up from the track out onto the trails.It’s almost a month before the last races of the late spring season here (we don't race anything other than triathlons during the summer here!), so the time for easy-paced mileage is beginning to pass, at least at the track. The track workouts for my more experienced team members is going to increase (a little) in intensity; higher perceived effort, shorter rest interval or longer distance…two of the three (in the case of some team members, all three) variables more often than not.

I made a comment while writing last month's club newsletter, something to the extent of ‘if you’re not running the repeat at the right intensity level you’re wasting your time.’ This also lends itself to a phrase one of my college coaches used to remind me, ‘you can run hard and you can run long, but you don’t run hard AND long.’ Easy days are where your body - and your mind - makes its gains in fitness. If you hammer all of your workouts, day after day after day…your mind will probably rebel (burnout); hopefully before the point where your body breaks down and you suffer an injury that will leave you frustrated and focusing on rehabilitation.

How do you gauge how hard you’re working; when to back off, when to take it easy? I gauge my workouts by percentage of maximum heart rate above 50 percent (by tens, so 50-59 percent would merit a 1, 60-69 a 2, 70-79 a 3, and so on...) multiplied by time, so if I run for 60 minutes at 50 percent of max heart rate, I score a 60 (1 x 60). Ride a bike for four hours at 50 percent effort would equal 240 (240 x 1), the same as an hour of running with an average heart rate of 80-90 percent (60 x 4), more or less.

You can check your pulse at the end of repeats – rather than your stopwatch - in much the same way as I check my athletes if they have no monitor and I want to know how hard they've been working. A perceived effort scale to “ballpark” your effort works great for weight training, where heart rates are less intense, if you don't want to check your pulse all afternoon.
If you felt the effort on a track workout was 8 on a 1-to-10 scale, then subtract five and multiply by the workout duration (90 minutes, usually), which would give, in this case, a 270. A number in the 100s is an “easy” day; a score above 300 might merit easy workouts for the next day or two, or perhaps a rest day and an easy day. If you’re not doing too much the next day at work you can probably stand to go out and run for an hour, as long as you keep the effort between a 6 and a 7 on that 10-point perceived effort scale.As you approach the racing season, if performing well is your goal, your training focus needs to move away from ‘more miles are better’ and closer to ‘how comfortable am I at this speed? Can I hold this for an entire race?’