[jdubus]

jdubus on February 4, 2021 at 6:48 pm · in reply to: 10 weeks into training my AeT is going down and I’m getting slower? #50457

Update! Good and bad news I guess, but I’m feeling very positive.

The super short version is I still have ADS and I don’t seem to have a higher AeT than when I did the first test back in August, however, at the moment I am not frustrated because I feel as fit as I ever have ski touring, which was the whole point of this!

There is of course the caveat that in previous seasons I weighed 15-25 pounds more *and* I was mixing in resort skiing with my ski touring unlike this season *and* my overall volume must have been lower, but still, I’m now able to do back-to-back half-day tours of 5000′ vert (while sleeping in my car in between) and feel recovered within a couple days. Under normal skinning conditions I’m climbing 1000′ in around 45 minutes while mainly nose-breathing. (I don’t normally wear a chest HRM ski touring for fear of it interfering with my beacon, and my watch seems even less reliable at detecting my hear trate in cold weather, so I’m not totally sure what my heart rate is, but it feels like it’s around my AeT for the most part). Previously I think mid-season pace was more like 1000’/hour, and at a heart rate closer to my AnT.

I still want to push my AeT up to the high 150s (AnT-10%) but that will likely have to wait until the summer I guess.

Of course, all this just leads to new questions, most of which don’t belong in this thread.

One question that is relevant to this thread though:

When I do finish the ski season and go back to attempting to move up my AeT, is it advisable to drop strength training entirely until I reach that threshold? Or maybe do two strength sessions a week but keep them mellow enough that I can do recovery aerobic sessions the same day? Given the improvement in my fitness that’s happened since the ski season started, I get the sense that I was doing too little aerobic volume at too difficult of a pace.

Just want to close (for now haha) with appreciation for all of these resources. I wish I had discovered structured training while I was still in the middle of my athletic prime.

[jdubus]

jdubus on November 27, 2020 at 9:05 am · in reply to: 10 weeks into training my AeT is going down and I’m getting slower? #47101

For what it’s worth, here are the three Aerobic Threshold Tests I’ve done. I’ll do another one once I resolve some issues with my HRM strap that have popped up in the last week or two, from either cooler temps or interference with some new bluetooth headphones. I’ve basically been in a holding pattern of two days a week of the squat routine plus three or four days a week of one- to two-hour runs or hikes with heartrates between 120 and 140. I figure if you can’t have enough base workouts then I should at least be doing some benefit with those?

http://tpks.ws/VZWCAUAEMKN3DTI4FEYTRMETSU

http://tpks.ws/B4UMC5X424A6NTI4FEYTRMETSU

http://tpks.ws/W6CTRVGQ7QTKJTI4FEYTRMETSU

[jdubus]

jdubus on October 22, 2020 at 10:05 am · in reply to: 10 weeks into training my AeT is going down and I’m getting slower? #46168

Thanks Scott, I really appreciate the long and thoughtful response, as well your frequent and in-depth responses to other threads. I do find it quite helpful.

I think it’s very unlikely given what you said that I’ve undertrained. Since I live in the Bay Area and the weather has been very consistent on the “test” days, I doubt that that’s the issue. I had been doing leg blasters for months before I switched from zone 4 runs to zone 2 runs (i.e. before I got slower and my AeT went lower), and my strength sessions the past five weeks have at least felt much less taxing than the leg blaster-based sessions, so I don’t think leg fatigue from those days have been the issue, or at least the primary issue either.

That leaves overtraining which seems the most likely cause. I just finished a quite-busy, fairly high-stress month of work in which I often didn’t sleep as much or as well as I had been. I was proud that I didn’t let my busy schedule prevent me from my (new) normal load of training, but it seems that I should have modulated it somewhat to compensate for the other stress in my life.

The zone 2 workouts feel so easy that it seems like I could do them as often as I have the time for, but it seems that it’s not so simple as that.

[jdubus]

jdubus on October 21, 2020 at 4:25 pm · in reply to: 10 weeks into training my AeT is going down and I’m getting slower? #46134

Thanks Jake,

I’m sure that some of the days on which I’ve been slow (including maybe the second AeT test) had to do with tired legs, but today for instance I’m coming off a rest day yesterday and a gym day before that from which I didn’t feel much or any leg fatigue. (Since gyms reopened I’ve been doing max strength work rather than leg blasters, which seem more like muscle endurance/plyometric work.)