Training Zones and Pace Discipline for Runners

First, a quick shout out to Jill and Stacey for their performance at the Houston Marathon. They ran 3:29:20 on a cold and windy day to secure their BQ's, and did such an awesome job preparing for this race. Congrats, ya'll! Coach is proud of you!

I wanted to start a series on training zones for my athletes and runner friends to use as a resource. It can be hard to figure out all of the jargon and get past some of the trends and "bro-science" that's out there. For better or worse, there's more and more content creators out there giving advice, and I think it's important to be able to discern what is good viable information and what is not, but more importantly, what do we do with the good stuff we do know!

Training zones are the specific pace, heart rate, and effort ranges that correspond to different intensities and physiological processes that take place within the body during exercise, particularly, how our body provides fuel to our muscles for locomotion. It's important to realize that there are all kinds of training models out there, and the training zone models an exercise physiologist refers to in a scientific study or other type of literature may not always directly correspond to the models a coach might use, or what you might read or hear from various people in other training related content.

Why are training zones important? We have different thresholds and physiological markers throughout the range of intensities our bodies are capable of during exercise. Many athletes are familiar with some of them like VO2 max, lactate threshold, anaerobic threshold, etc... You might say training zones are the range of intensities between these various points on the intensity scale. Each zone elicits a different physiological response that produces adaptation over time. It's also important to note that your body does not understand metrics like mileage or pace; what it does understand is duration and intensity, and our bodies have different ways of producing the fuel that it uses to varying degrees at all times dependent on physiological demands. If we want certain types of adaptions to occur then we need to spend a relatively significant amount of time in the corresponding training zones to obtain it. This is where "pace discipline" and managing your effort becomes important.

I pulled some charts from a couple of my athletes to illustrate some examples of good and bad pacing. Thankfully, it was kind of hard to find a not so great example, which is the one above. The athlete reported that it was a bit of a mediocre workout, and you can see a lot of variability in the charts. This workout had an easy aerobic warm up, some strides, 5-6 intervals with short recovery periods, some optional shorter faster intervals, and a cool down. They chose not to do the faster intervals since they were struggling somewhat with this workout. There was quite a bit of start and stop (the black lines are pauses), and they had a hard time finding that particular pace zone. I believe they overdid it in the 1st half, hence the long pause in the middle of the intervals, and then just went ahead and tried to keep it up for the last 3 before shutting it down and jogging home. Does that mean the workout was a waste of time? No. Was it as productive as it could've been? No, but they still got something out of it, and when repeated a couple weeks later they did much better.

Below is a different athlete with a similar workout. You can see right away this was a much better workout. They were spot on with pacing, their heart rate stayed fairly consistent in the desired range (variability was probably due to hills), they finished the workout strong with some speed work, and reported they had an excellent workout and felt great! When we can repeat these workouts over time, stay in the proper zones, and train consistently the positive adaptations compound and we get fitter, faster and stronger.

My basic goal with this series is to help people have a practical understanding of why it's important to train smart. There's plenty of great science out there if you really want to dive into the details, see the data, and gain a deeper understanding of sports physiology. As a coach, it's all about how I utilize the practical application of that knowledge to create high quality training that works for my athletes. As we go through the series I'll break things down to what's useful on a daily basis, how things should feel, etc. Next up will be easy aerobic running, currently trending as "zone 2!"

Cheers!

FF