Lactate test

What better way to spend the evening of Valentine's day than to do a lactate test? As last time, the protocol involved running 4 series of a kilometer around the track at a prescribed pace. Rather than relying on a GPS watch, the trick was to make sure I passed a cone every time the watch "beeped". The first two kilometers were run at 14 kph (conservative Marathon pace) and the second two were run at 15 kph (ambitious Marathon pace). Even if the numbers don't mean a lot to you (they don't to me), it is interesting to see the improvement since the test I did just prior to running Valencia Marathon:

Pre Valencia (November 2011)
	Speed (kph)	Lactate (mmol/L)	Heart rate (bpm)
	14	1.7	155
	14	1.7	158
	15	2.7	167
	15	2.9	166
Pre Seville (February 2011)
	Speed (kph)	Lactate (mmol/L)	Heart rate (bpm)
	14	1.2	153
	14	1.4	149
	15	2.3	159
	15	2.2	160

Pre Getafe (January 2011)
	Speed (kph)	Lactate (mmol/L)	Heart rate (bpm)
	15	3.2	158
	15	2.2	159
	16	3.9	166
	16	4.4	170

 Just judging by my heart rate, there is a clear improvement: I ran the second set at 15 kph with virtually the same heart rate as the second set at 14 kph last time round. My lactate clearing abilities have also improved for what that's worth.

With all that, Jonathan reckons that I can aim for a pace somewhere between 4:05 and 4:10 per kilometer but that, in any case, I should keep a close eye on my heart rate.

Lactate test

After they had finished with me last night I looked as though I had just narrowly won a fight with a vampire, with streaks of blood standing out violently against the fluorescent yellow of my jacket. To measure the lactate levels in your blood, the only way to do it is by extracting blood. As timing is the key - we are interested in how quickly the body is able to metabolize or "clear" the lactate - the trick is to prick a hole in the subject's ear, thus providing a steady supply of drops of blood to analyze.

I wouldn't normally have my lactate tested before a "B" race like the Half Marathon I am running this weekend in Getafe but, in this case, one of the students of the Universidad de Europa where my trainer is based, was looking for victims - I mean subjects -´to form part of a study for a doctoral thesis. Normally each test requires a patch which costs around 7 euros, so I thought I might as well take advantage of a free test. Perhaps the real reason was that I knew that I would get a "discount" on my otherwise hard Tuesday night training session! (I still had to run 10 minutes at my anaerobic threshold afterwards, which I did at around 16,8 kph).

The protocol was one I was fairly used to. I had to run a kilometer round a track at a prescribed pace. In order to make sure I kept the right pace, I had to ensure that a watch I was provided with "beeped" every time I passed a marker. More than keeping pace, it was important to avoid sudden accelerations and better to err on the side of going too slow, otherwise my lactate levels could blow up prematurely. The first two kilometer runs were at a pace supposedly below my Half Marathon pace, at 4:00 per kilometer (15 kph). The second two, I ran at 3:45 (16 kph). At the end of each kilometer, I would take my pulse (155, 156, 166, 170) and Iker would extract a drop of blood in order to measure my lactate levels.

Afterwards I had a chat with Jonathan. Based on the lactate test and recent training, he said that I should try to run the Half Marathon at a pace of 3:50. That means running it in 1:20, or a two minute improvement on my best time!! As it is a "B" race, I think I can afford to take the risk. Sometimes you are more limited by what you think you can achieve than you realize.

Lactate test

Last night was the last test before the Marathon, to confirm that the pace I want to go out at is realistic. In other words, that I am not going to accumulate lactic acid in my muscles. This isn't the only thing that can scupper a Marathon but at least it is something relatively easy to measure.

The test involved running a kilometer round the tartan track at a prescribed pace (I had to make sure I passed the little cones set apart every 100 meters every time my watch beeped) and then my pulse was read and a drop of blood was extracted from my ear to measure the amount of lactate that had accumulated.

I did the first two kilometers in 4:15 (just under sub 3 hour Marathon pace) and the last two in 4:00. My pulse rate for the first two was 155 at the end and, for the second two, was 166. I have to wait to hear the verdict from the lactate analysis, but it looked like it was very low (and constant, i.e., not accumulating) at the pace of 4:15. (I just got the results: 1.7 mmol at 4:15 per km and 2.9 mmol at 4:00 per km. As expected, my pace should be somewhere between the two but closer to 4:15. Here is a good article on the subject.)

My coach was there and said that the question wasn't whether to go at sub 3 hour pace but rather to risk going for an even faster time. Unless the results say otherwise I aim to stick to the plan I laid out recently: run to the pulse rate set out by Jonathan, at which I have never blown up (touch wood) and, at which, I have achieved several personal best times.

Results of lactate test & Ironman race plan

At first sight, it looks as though I have got worse since the tests I did back in December and January. But the main purpose of this test was to measure the blood lactate levels and this meant that the steps in the "ramp protocol" were much coarser. That is to say, the Watts at which I was pedaling were incremented by 50W every 3 minutes and I ran a whole kilometer at a pace that was increased by 10 seconds per kilometer each time. The important point about the test is to try to establish the pace / effort for which I should aim to do each leg of the Ironman. All we can really be sure about is that my heart rate should be somewhere between my Aerobic Threshold (AeT or UAE) and my Anaerobic Threshold (AT or UAN) - the question is where? Overcook it and the punishment will be severe!

On the other had, I scored very highly on efficiency on the bike. According to calculations done by Jonathan and Diego, this means that I am able to convert a remarkably high proportion of the energy I metabolize directly into Watts on the bike ergometer. I suppose that is what one should hope for after all this training - I can't expect to be especially powerful as that is not the aim but I should be efficient.

So I've just been to see Jonathan for the last time before the race. We sat down and poured over the numbers from this test and the tests I had done previously. Here's where art meets science and years of experience (and, particularly, years of experience of coaching me) comes into play. We decided to take the upper threshold on the bike (AT) from the previous test because it seems too low, especially considering that - if my reading of the random heart rate profile from Lisbon is roughly correct - I was cruising along at about 150bpm which would be over my AT according to this test. We also took the AT for the run from the last test as this time we didn't go as far as this. He did say that my lactate levels were some of the lowest he had seen in any athlete(!) which indicates that the training has replaced many of my muscle fibers with the slow twitch endurance kind. (By the way, as I understand it, you get DOMS - Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness - after either a very intense activity or a low intensity prolonged activity: both produce micro tears in the muscle fibers which must be repaired. The rebuilding of the muscle gives the body an opportunity to change the fibers from one type to another although it is widely believed that many of our muscle fibers are of one type and cannot be commuted to the other.)

The strategy is to do the swim at "A2", which corresponds to half way between my AeT and AT for swimming; as I don't really have any reference at this point other than the training I have done, I will swim as hard as I can while maintaining what form I have, as I did in Lisbon. I've a feeling that if I try any harder I'll actually end up going more slowly, not to mention blowing up.

Jonathan says that I should be on the cautious side on the bike: after all this is double the distance of a Half Ironman (duh!). My Achilles heel is heat and humidity tolerance and I have had a couple of races where I have overdone it and ended up suffering at the hands of the dreaded cramps. On the other hand, if I don't push it too hard, the run has every possibility of being fast and, perhaps more importantly, actually enjoyable in a sort of Ironman kind of way. All the same, I'm still not as confident with my heart rate zones and exertion on the bike so the idea is to not strictly adhere to a pulse rate but to go by feeling to some extent. Being prudent, this feeling should correspond to about a quarter way between AeT (128 bpm) and AT (156 bpm), or about 135 bpm - or, in reference to my training, half way between where I did 90% of my rides and the medium intensity (CMED). There are a couple of small hills on the course, which are pathetic by Madrid standards but can, nevertheless, send your heart rate spiking through the roof: for the hills, I can permit myself to go up to but not beyond my AT (156 bpm). In the Half Ironman, I remember that from a cardiovascular point of view, it was not too taxing on the bike - I was breathing about as heavily as I would on a prank call if if ever did such things - but the legs felt constantly tight and uncomfortable and I even wondered how it would be to run on them afterwards. As we are talking about doing twice the distance on the bike this time, before embarking on the Marathon, my legs should not feel so stressed.

The run is where I can hopefully let rip. The idea is to keep my heart rate between around 156 and 161 bpm. In any case, I have much more intuition for how to pace myself running, even if it is after having swum and cycled. More than anything else, I just hope I can get into a good rhythm. There's a certain running speed which may not be the fastest at which I can run a particular distance that just feels like the natural speed for me to run at: any slower or faster feels wasteful. I don't think I can realistically think of running the second half of the Marathon faster than the first, or even at the same pace, but I'd really like to avoid hitting any kind of "wall" if I can help it.

Lactate test

Definitely one of the less unpleasant tests I have had to do. The first part of test involved cycling at ever increasing intensities (Watts) while my pulse and CO2 / O2 interchange were measured (as in previous VO2 Max tests) as well as my blood lactate concentration.

I'm smiling under the mask, honest!

Here's where the unpleasantness comes in: the only way to measure your blood lactate concentration is by measuring the lactate concentration in your blood - doh! In other words, every 3 minutes Diego would prick my ear and extract a drop of blood for analysis. Oh, and by the way, each analysis costs 3 euros (not Diego's fault, but just the cost of the patches).

Blood, sweat but thankfully no tears

After safely clearing my second threshold on the bike - the anaerobic threshold above which the energy metabolism is primarily from glycogen - it was time to go out on the track and repeat the same test running. I got quite a lot of funny looks from the people playing football on the pitch I was running round. On my back in the backpack was the little machine that measures my CO2 / O2 interchange and sends the signal by radio (what technology!) to where Diego was waiting with his needle to take yet more blood samples. I had to run around the track at a predetermined and ever increasing pace which is trickier than it sounds. To help, Diego had set a stopwatch to beep every certain number of seconds and my job was to make sure I was passing a marker at exactly this moment. We had a few technical difficulties with tubes falling out and stopwatches running out of batteries but it looks as though we managed to get some good data for analysis. The good thing is that the conditions were very similar to what I imagine Brazil will throw at me.

If you are curious as to what the point of this bizarre test is, have a look at a post I wrote some time ago in which I tried to explain the significance of the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, as well as the MLSS (Maximum Lactate Steady State) threshold. Hopefully I'll get the results in the next few days and they will give me an indication as to what kind of pace / heart rate I can aim for both on the bike and for the Marathon leg of the Ironman.

Before starting the test, I bumped into Carlos - who is also doing Ironman Brazil. He had just done his test and was happy that the pain he'd been experiencing in his leg while running over the last few weeks had finally subsided. So - TOUCH WOOD - it looks as though both of us are ready to DO THIS THING!

Maximum strength

The question is, can he get up from there?

I did the maximum strength test last night which consists of "squatting" ever increasing weights until you fall over backwards. Its perfectly safe because the dumbbell is constrained to move in a vertical plane and there are safety stops so you don't get completely squashed. Diego measured the power I was able to generate with each successive weight increase using a small device which measures the velocity at which I could lift the bar. Just like a car has a different power response at different loads - typically a petrol engine has a "humped" power-torque curve with a maximum power at a sub-maximum torque (force) - it is interesting to know for what load (weight) we can generate the most power (force x velocity). I must have a diesel engine because I reached my maximum power just at the point where I reached my maximum force and literally could not lift the weight. Its quite a disconcerting sensation of impotence and bewilderment when you are literally unable to stand back up. Once you get to these kind of weights, I think it becomes important to have a reasonably good squatting technique: if you let the weight fall too quickly it is impossible to overcome the momentum needed to change direction; if you go too slowly then you become tired. For some reason, my arms started to hurt much more than any other part of my body, presumably because I was straining against the bar, and today they are sore as hell - not sure how well I will swim today. My legs don't feel at all tired but then the dreaded DOMS (Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness) as their name suggests, often set in after 48 hours.

One of the interesting things that Jonathan has been experimenting with is the relationship between the velocity at which someone can squat and the weight. He has established a very convincing relationship between the two which means that you can estimate your maximum strength without having to lift maximal weights (which has its risks, of course, as well as being unpleasant). Unfortunately, the machine used for that test was at the menders so there was no option but to go until "failure".

Now that I have the results of the test, I can follow Jonathan's weight program more correctly. When he sets me a weights session he specifies the number of sets, the exercises I should do, the number of repetitions in each set, the time I should take in lowering the weight in a controlled fashion, whether the lift should be explosive or not and, finally, at what percentage of my maximum strength (RM = Rendimiento Máximo) the lifts should be executed. Up until now, I have been setting the weight to be that which I can lift the number of times I have to lift it. Nevertheless, just as it is important to find that Maximum Effective Dose, it can be more effective to exercise sub-maximally. I find that for almost all the other exercises I do (lats, calves, quadriceps, isquiotibiales or hamstrings as they are more commonly known, glutes or bum) I need to use about half the weight I would squat in order to achieve the same intensity.

Results of bike test

Please allow me to gloat just this once. I may never win anything again worth winning or beat any records worth beating but I think I have a right to feel chuffed about the results of my bike test. You get a mark out of 10 for each of the various categories, your VO2max, how close to your VO2max your anaerobic threshold is, your effeciency in terms of oxygen use, how many watts you can crank out etc. The mark "10" usually corresponds to an elite athlete (for example, Paula Radcliffe, unsurprisingly, gets 10 out of 10 for running efficiency and VO2max, a combination of which makes her a World Record Marathon runner). Ordinary mortals may get very high marks for some aspects but not for others, resulting in a good performance but not a World beating one. Well, I didn't get 10 in some of the criteria, I got #N/A! which means literally "off the scale" (more than 10, not less than zero - very funny!). My VO2max came out lower than in the running test I did at the end of last year (53 versus 61) which I suppose reflects the comments I made here on the day of the test.

I shall enjoy my little victory but now the trick is to convert it into something meaningful, or at least, something that is recognized (by me, if not by others).

Haha, I managed to crash the spreadsheet with pure leg power

Bike test

I did the VO2max test on the bike today. You can't really argue with that very straight line showing an almost perfect linear relationship between my pulse rate and the number of watts I was cranking out, which were being steadily increased by Diego, my friendly "torturer". It got to the point where I couldn't go any further just because the weight of my legs was not enough to move the pedals any more; I would have had to get up out of the seat which is probably more like running than cycling (certainly it has little to do with cycling in an Ironman).

I found it very useful to do the test (again) even though my thresholds look as though they will still be where they have been for the past year. This time there was a point in the test when I noticed my breathing pattern change; I glanced at my watch and - lo and behold - it showed 125bpm which is exactly where my aerobic threshold is. The same thing happened at my anaerobic threshold. So this gives me confidence in the thresholds, something that is vitally important, as I have stressed several times already, if I am going to stick to the training and racing plans. What also helps me to accept the 30bpm difference between my cycling and running aerobic thresholds is the fact that I was only able to get to 178bpm while seated; in running (and in general, for that matter) my maximum heart rate is 191. I had previously estimated my maximum heart rate while cycling to be 185bpm, which I registered during a duathlon last year. However, this was going up a b*astard hill standing up on the pedals and cursing loudly.

I still have some doubts over how much the cooling of a 30kp/h wind on the position of the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. It's clear to me that you can eek out more wattage at a given pulse rate cycling outdoors compared to being on a stifling static bike but this doesn't necessarily mean that the thresholds obtained in the lab are wrong; the question becomes whether you should go by power, by heart rate or by "feel". One thing I do notice, is that when you are out on the road, you are much more distracted and the conditions are constantly changing, such that it becomes very difficult to judge your aerobic zone by feel. By contrast, when I am running, I can usually predict my heart rate to within a beat. I guess this is why so many people by those extraordinarily expensive power meters. I'll stick to my trusty heart rate monitor.

Hmmm, slightly disappointing...

I got the results back from the "lab" today. As I predicted, my VO2max has gone up a little bit as a result of losing some weight but. contrary to my expectations, my running economy has got worse (that is to say, it is a higher number). Still, the optimistic way to look at it is to say that I did a good Marathon with a less than optimal running economy so there is some room for some improvement if I concentrate on running instead of this triathlon business. What's probably more likely is that there is a lot of error in the measurement - the most important thing for me is to go by the pulse rates in training rather than by the paces in the table (which tend to be much slower when I run on the treadmill). What is good news is that my thresholds have gone up by about 5 beats per minute so that means I can push the envelope a little more in my training runs. Anyway, so that you see what kind of feedback I get, here is the report - sorry that it is in Spanish:

CORRECTION:  In the end, I asked Diego to double check the results because it was strange that my thresholds should have increased by so much, when they have been around the same levels for years now. This is the revised report:

The VO2 Max Challenge

Now I know what a lab rat feels like...

I did a VO2max test today because Jonathan said that it would be a good idea to have a point of reference for the Marathon when it comes to the Ironman: I may find that all the cycling and swimming has a slightly detrimental effect on my running economy and we will be able to measure that and make the necessary adjustments.

The test itself is quite simple on paper but quite hard in practice. It consists of running on a treadmill while your pulse rate, oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide emissions are measured. Ah, and the speed is gradually increased until you can't keep up with the belt and are finally forced to stop. I always finish thinking I could probably have continued just a little longer but then, looking at the results, I usually see that I have hit my maximum heart rate and so that the debate I was having with myself in my head was eventually won by the right "me". In any case, it doesn't make sense to go crazy - I'd only end up getting injured.

Apart from measuring where my aerobic and anaerobic thresholds are (see previous post) and, of course, where my VO2max is, it is very interesting to see whether my running economy is improving. The VO2max is basically a measure of the maximum volume of oxygen I can burn (literally) per minute divided by my mass. The only improvements there seem to come from me losing weight. My running economy, however, has been improving in leaps and bounds. The running economy is defined by how much oxygen consumption (again, divided by mass) is required per velocity at each of the two thresholds - the lower the number, the better. As you can see, my running economy at both thresholds has been getting steadily better. It will be interesting to see the results from the test: I'll post them here once I get them.

In January I'll do the corresponding test on the bike. As you use less muscle mass when you are cycling, the thresholds for the bike are at much lower heart rates than for running. In my case, they are some 30 beats lower which I have trouble accepting. It means that I have to go really easy on the bike in training and it is impossible to go up even the slightest hill without breaching the limit. What makes it particularly hard to accept is that, in running, I notice my breathing pattern changes at each of the two thresholds and I don't really need a pulsemeter to know I am in the right zone; on the bike it feels like I don't get to the lower (aerobic) threshold unless I am competing. I have to decide whether to "have faith" like I did, finally, for my running training. The risk is that I will not advance enough on the bike in training and that I will get frustrated in the race and throw all caution to the wind. Phil Maffetone, the coach of Mark Allen (6 times Ironman World Champion), claims that the thresholds are independent of the sport and can be accurately predicted with a formula. My coach says that he absolutely does not agree with him and, I have to say, I am naturally sceptical of anyone claiming to have a magic formula. But this is just the sort of thing that might pop into my head half way through the bike leg of the Ironman if I am below my desired pace... I have the answer to that one already: thou shalt not worship false idols!