2013 pre race planning

After lots of cajoling (read nagging) and hours spent wistfully looking at their website,  Andy finally agreed to let me enter us for the Salomon 4 Trails event in July.  For those that are not familiar with it, its basically the lil' sister of Transalpine with only 4 stages instead of 8.  Its run by the same company with the same fantastic locations and organisation so we knew we would be getting value for money and a good experience in the Alps.  We didn't have much in the diary for our 2013 season other than the  Might Contain Nuts Welsh series so I was keen to get some more events lined up and my eye had been on 4 trails since Transalpine last September.  So I was a happy girl.  :-)

Made happier still when Andy "I don't think I'd ever do another Transalpine" Bruce announced that as 4 Trails was such good training it would be a waste NOT do enter Transalpine again this year!  Needing no further encouragement I promptly signed us up (I do that a lot, and not always with Andy's knowledge....), booked the hotels and started thinking about training properly for these events.  Those of you that have read my blog about Translapine 2012 will know that I didn't go into the race as trained as I would have liked so I am keen to make that right this time around.  So this time we have built ourselves structured training plans with threshold, V02 and hill sessions among many others.  Only hitch there was I didn't know what my HR was in any of these zones.  Enter Pete Byworth of Metabolic Solutions.  Pete offers a variety of scientific tests for athletes and Andy and I booked ourselves in for some V02 testing.  In layman's terms, V02 is basically the amount of oxygen you are absorbing into the blood stream in millilitres per minute.  The highest number you record is know as your V02 max.  This number by itself is fairly arbitrary - its mostly genetically predetermined and you are unable to increase this number by more than 10-12%.  What is important about this number is that it gives you accurate HR zones in which to train effectively.  This is what we came to find out and were duly donned with face masks hooked up to various beeping machines and set off on the treadmill.  Slowly at first, a nice gentle walk that increased in tempo up to 11kph.  So far so good.  Then came the increase in incline.  This got progressively less pleasant as the inclined went up by 2 each increment until I was practically sprinting up a hill, breathing into a mask with Andy and Pete shouting at me to "keep it up!".  Finally the data was recorded and the test was over.  And although it only lasted about 18 minutes, it wiped me out!  But, we got some great readings from it that will allow me to structure my workouts much more effectively knowing EXACTLY where my HR should be in any given session.  It also told me that my body is very efficient at burning fat as its main fuel source - excellent for endurance sports. 

So armed with this knowledge I have been able to add very specific sessions into my schedule which will do away with junk mileage and make each session I do more effective for me.  The lucky thing is that Andy and I posted relatively similar results (Andy's V02 max is 64.something and mine is 61.4) so we should be able to do these intense sessions together, which is always easier than trying to do them on your own.  I am very excited about the coming weeks and came away from the test with not only a set of very useful results, but a huge confidence boost going into an intense 10 week block of training for 4 Trails.