How fast do I run on race day?

You should run at the highest sustainable pace you can. 🙂

This isn’t answerable. Or it is if you accept that what someone recommends may not work for you. Any answers will depend on fitness, experience, pain tolerance, and most importantly, duration.

“Your last ultra race” isn’t specific enough. What distance? And more importantly, how long did it take the person that responds to your question?

More specific to you:

* What is the distance and gain of the race that you’re training for?
* When you do a long training session, what is the distance and gain?
* How long does a long session take and at what heart rate (relative to AeT)?
* How many of those long sessions can you do day after day? Can you do enough of them to add up to the distance and gain of the goal event?

Yeah it one of those things that you know when you done one but at the same time you need to do your first at some point…

True! Almost everyone starts too fast in their first (few) race(s). When the adrenaline is pumping, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking how strong you are. Weirdly, some people never learn from this and start too fast, always.

The way to tell is how much your pace falls off as the race goes on. If you feel like you can attack near the end of the race and drop whoever is in your cohort, then your pacing was probably pretty good.

I don’t want to blow up halfway into the race but at the same time, I just don’t want to be overly conservative either.

Races never go perfectly. If you get near the end and feel like you have something left in the tank, that’s ideal. Then you can attack when your competitors are at their weakest (unless they’re better pacers than you).

I measured AeT to be 160 (hand held lactate meter) and the 1h max run test resulted in an AnT of 171. I’m currently 6 weeks into the BIG VERT plan so I’ll hopefully improve a bit more before race day…

Your threshold heart rates are already very close together, so you may never see any improvement, ever. Changes in heart rate are a “first wave” response.

However! After that is where the real improvement gains are made: in pace. Even if your heart rates don’t change, you likely have years of improvement ahead of you in your threshold paces at those same heart rates. That’s much more valuable.

My last long run was 34 km and 1400 meters of elevation. I “ran” that in 4h45m. The BIG VERT plan calls for no more than 30 min in Z2. That’s not really feasible for me with this much elevation…

In a training session? Of course it’s feasible. Go slower. I have no idea why people say this so often, that they “can’t” stay in Z2 (or Z1 or Z0 etc). Just go slower. Stop running uphill and walk. If HR is still too high, walk slower. If it’s still too high, rest step.

But wait… did you mean Z3? You wrote “no more than 30 minutes in Z2”. If that’s what the BV plan says, please let me know where. Thanks!

Am I tired after a long run like this? Sure. It’s not like my legs are yelling “this was fun! Let’s do it again!!” But at the same time, it’s not like I’m dead either. I could go again if needed…

Perfect! That sounds like the right intensity then.

I seem to remember reading somewhere here in a forum post that people are running ultras mainly in Z2. Is that true? And if it is true, are we talking about the AeT HR or the AeT pace (does the HR zone drift…).

It depends. Can you post a link to the forum thread?

HR will always drift in a race because it’s much more stressful. And although the average HR may end up “in Z2”, the fluctuation in intensities (and actual load) will be much higher and much lower.

Best guess I have right now is that I should start out at roughly Z1 max pace and then try to keep an even pace throughout the race.

I think that would be on the low side. Your HR will be elevated from stress before the race and in the first 10-20′. So sticking to a Z1 heart rate will be too slow a pace than you’re capable of.

Try this instead: in training between now and your race, ditch the headphones (if you use them), and pay attention to the cadence of your breathing relative to your heart rate in race-specific terrain. Learn what your breathing feels like in Z2, Z3, Z4. Then in the race, use your ventilation to gauge your intensity. That will be much more reliable than HR because of the additional stressors in a race.

For example, as the race goes on, ventilation will remain pretty consistent for a given intensity, but as fear, fatigue, heat, dehydration, lactate, and muscle damage increase, so will heart rate. Just because your heart rate increases doesn’t necessarily mean that you should slow down or you won’t finish. If your breathing rate feels sustainable, then you’re probably at the right pace.

This would mean that I’m definitely climbing over the measured AeT HR at the later parts of the race. Especially when going uphill.

Yes, and you should.

But I’m also worried that this is a bit conservative and that I should start faster.

Is this going to be your last race? If not, look at it as a learning experience. (And every race thereafter.) As I said, races never go perfectly.

Ah, okay, that explains it. For athletes with a narrow gap (< 10%) between AeT and AnT, Zone 2 is much more fatiguing. So it has to be used much less. That's where the 30' recommendation comes from. But if you don't find Zone 2 fatiguing, then you can do a lot more volume in that range.

The fatigue from Zone 2 continues to be a greater factor as the aerobic system improves. Once athletes get the AnT / AeT gap in the neighbourhood of 5%, high-Zone-2 training is nearly as fatiguing as threshold work (Zone 4). Zone 3, the gap between zones 2 and 4, becomes so narrow, that it’s generally avoided except for very specific goal event training.

Lastly, if you want to maximize your genetic potential as an endurance athlete, I would think very hard about this:

But Z1/Z2 training is kind of boring or at least less rewarding (mentally) in comparison to always feeling dead at the end of a run.

This is a gratification problem. Fatigue does not equal fitness—it can exist without increases in fitness—so using it as a measure of a job well done is a big mistake. We’ve all been there. (I have several of the t-shirts myself…) But you’ll have the most success after Z1/2 is your favorite intensity.

The clients I have that are the most successful have a few things in common: 1) consistency and frequency (training is a part of their daily life); and 2) an almost Zen-like approach to the most important work (using Z1/2 as moving meditation).

Hi Anna,

Take a look at Scott’s writeup on how heart rate & zones evolve – might help with some of your questions. https://www.scottsemple.com/aerobic-evolution/

I’m interpreting this discussion of “fatiguing” to be on the days-to-weeks timescale, not necessarily how a run feels in the moment. You might have a narrow ~5% gap between AeT and AnT, but if your zone 2 pace is a 9:00 min/mile jog, it won’t be as physiologically taxing as it would be if your zone 2 pace were 6:00 min/mile. For the same amount of hours of training, the second pace would be 50% more miles, which will demand more of tendons, bones, etc.

The initial intended audience of Training for the New Alpinism was fairly advanced athletes. People like me, with <400 hours per year of structured training, don’t have “magic bodies” but instead just have more room for improvement.

Most zone 1 workouts will leave you refreshed, more energized than when you started. A 34-km training run won’t fall into that category, but feeling ready to go again in a day or two means that it was a workout that Andreas could recover from, get stronger, and build off of. (A workout where he “banked” fitness rather than “withdrew” fitness.)

-Reed

Any updates, Andreas or Anna? I’d love to see other people’s experience with HR strategy during 10+ hour ultras.

I’m targeting a 55-mile (89 km) self-supported solo mountain run with about 10,000′ (3000m) in elevation gain in the remote High Sierra (the Evolution 100k) in late September.* I’ll be racing the daylight rather than other runners though. I’d like to minimize my headlight time at the end of the run for safety and marital harmony. So, in essence, it’s like a race in that I’d like to complete it as quickly as possible, but the consequences of a blowup are greater.

Anyhow, my current plan is to try to stay at or below AeT for the first two-thirds of the run, which probably means walking the majority of the climbs and trying to run all the flats and downhills. But I’ve done a few 23-24 milers in similar conditions in the past six weeks, and I’ve noticed that I’m right at AeT when slowly running the flats for the final few miles. It’s safe to assume that when the distance is doubled, I’ll eventually have to go over AeT and solidly into Zone 3 on any flats or techy downhills during the last third if I’m to keep running. Hopefully, the cooler temps in late September and the next two months of training will help though.

Anyhow, again, any data points of peoples’ HR experience/strategy in ultras would be appreciated.

*My AeT is around 142. I’ve been doing all sub-AeT runs for the past couple months. But in skimo, I can maintain an HR in the low 170’s during 35-minute max effort climbs, so I figure my lactate threshold is likely near 170. I’m currently running over 57 miles per week in the mountains at or, usually, below AeT. I’m not sure if these specifics are relevant to my inquiry, but everyone else here mentions such stats so I figured I should too.

briguy: Thanks for the response. For the first half of an ultra (let’s say 32 miles+/50km+), any idea what your usual HR are relative to your AeT? And if you’re keeping it around AeT, do you ever temporarily spike higher (e.g., finishing a climb) or do you try to keep it fairly constant?

Side Note: After doing so much Zone 1 and 2 running, I’ve kind of forgotten what it’s like to push myself at a more strenuous pace.

Oh, also I recently did an “event” that sorta corresponds to your 55m ultra and so I’ll point out a couple of things I noticed since this was one of the first super-long ultras that I did after training under UA guidelines. In my case it was “vertical ultra” as I did 16000+ vertical feet over the course of 11+ hours, so not quite the same but I think some things might apply.

– I did keep HR in zone 1 early on, only spiking past it here and there on particularly steep section.

– Late into the “run” I found perceived level of effort for Z2 to be quite hard. In other words, I would be working very hard, out of breath, needing a rest break etc and check my HR only to find it in Z2. I attribute this to just overall fatigue. I’ve found this to occur in other long races where it seems like the heart just gets “tired” and is simply unable to reach the upper zones for BPM.