Thanks for all the responses. So I definitely will re-do my AnT test, I started to get the feeling that it was a little higher than what I had ball parked it from the shorter race. The weird thing with that race was I had a couple months of only base miles, with no avg HR over 145bpm for a run, and during the race aerobically I felt pretty good but for some reason I just couldn’t push and keep my HR up above 165 for long. This has been an issue of mine in the past when I did a lot of road racing where it felt like my legs would fatigue before I would be aerobically maxed out.
As Scott J said, I initially would have thought I may be more efficient at the 150-160bpm range but whenever I did zone 3 intervals during this training block it felt really taxing to get my HR up over 160 and maintain that. After a little while I started to feel more comfortable but always better in the lower HR ranged 135-150 for climbing. The races seemed like outliers, where the pace felt like it was at the top end of conversational for the first half of the climbing and then started to feel more challenging but manageable the whole way. The marathon was a death march the last 5-8miles but Imogene I actually felt quite good an was running low6s to 7mins for the last several miles (downhill though).
Would it be worth it to test both my AeT and AnT running at this time of year with skimo season coming up, or would that best be saved for when I’m on skis to get accurate HR zones for that mode of exercise? Thanks again for the help, sorry for another long post.
