r/AdvancedRunning • u/RunNYC1986 • Jun 08 '24
Training Experience w/ lab lactate threshold testing. Worth it?
Hi all— just wondering what everyone’s experience has been doing lactate threshold testing in a lab, university performance center or even your own prick tests?
-Was it worth the investment?
-What was beneficial?
-Were the zones or details you identified surprising, or about on par/in the ballpark with what you can deduce from typical effort based training? (Or even your watch?)
These can be expensive and I generally have a sense of what my zones are. Just want to hear about other’s experiences.
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u/QxV Jun 08 '24 edited Jun 08 '24
I did it about a month ago and it completely changed my training, although your mileage may differ.
For context, I felt like I had plateaued in my training for about a year and a half. I was doing most of my runs easy, with one track day a week, one tempo run, and a long run, basically following the 80/20 rule, with about 50-70 mpw.
It was actually really funny when I got on the treadmill and the tech kept cranking up the speed and telling me that my blood lactate levels weren't rising. Turns out, what I thought was "easy" Z2 for me (around 8:45-9:00 min/mile) was deep in Z1, and my actual Z2 from testing was closer to 7:20-7:30 min/mile - I basically never ran at that pace for the past 2 years, it was either much slower during most of my runs, or faster during a workout.
My LT was about where I thought it was, maybe a touch higher.
But having the complete graph told me that I had to completely re-think how I train - my LT curve basically looked like a "trained athlete" (i.e., a curve with a bend vs. a straight line), and I need to stop base building and actually "push" the curve out to the right.
For me, what that meant was for the past month or so, I've completely switched my training week to focus on 3 hard workouts (Tuesdays, Fridays, Sundays), and fitting in easy/recovery miles as a secondary priority. Already I feel a lot faster at race paces (e.g., a 90 min half used to feel super hard for me about a year ago, but I'm doing 12 miles at that pace within an 18 mile long run).
Plan now is once I start to feel like I've stagnated with the LT work (probably in a few weeks?), to switch back to building mileage, but with some actual Z2 miles in there.
It also taught me that my own internal perception of easy/hard is not always right. I'm guessing that for an untrained person, Z2 is probably supposed to feel easier than what they think, but once you've built a solid base, I think Z2 no longer feels "easy".
All in all, well worth the money for me.