It’s not enough to have high thresholds — you need to be able to ride for a long time at those thresholds. This gives rise to the concept of durability. For cycling it’s fairly simple. A max power test on fresh legs, then 1000 kilojoules of load, and a repeat test. This is more or less known.
How to train “durability” — that’s where the realm of guesses and fantasies begins. But the logic stays the same: create fatigue at low intensity and finish at high intensity. But how do you determine duration and intensity? And most importantly — by what criteria do you assess improvements?
And if it’s skiing — that’s completely in the realm of fantasy. Ski until you get tired, then do X intervals for Y time. Speed depends on the terrain. All that’s left is heart rate.
Today I ran an interesting experiment.
Roller skis. Protocol:
- 1 lap warm-up lap (zone 1, VE 85–95), record lactate
- 1 lap control lap at race intensity (VE 135–145), record lactate
- 4 laps at aerobic threshold, top of zone 2 (VE 110), record lactate
- 1 lap repeat control lap = compare its metrics with the first control lap.
Here’s the results table:
Initially I planned to do 2 separate laps at race intensity, but already on the first one RPE was 7 and it became clear to me that it was “enough,” so I didn’t do the second one.
Now let’s assess the metrics:
- Speed: +4.6%
- HR: -0%
- VE: -1.2%
- BR: +8.6%
- VT: -7%
But in the last interval “on fatigue” at 7m21s my BR and VT changed by more than 10% — and that was noticeable in RPE. I made the right decision not to do the second lap.
Speed even increased, but I spent noticeably more effort (lactate was 2 mmol, became 2.6). Possibly the sun came out and the track became drier, and speed increased slightly on it.
Lactate here confirmed that my intensity chosen by VE was correct. My baseline lactate is 1–1.3 mmol., My race intensity is in the range of 2–3 mmol, threshold 3–3.5 mmol. Lactate at VO2max 5.0–5.5 mmol. So I’m not a sprinter, not acidic ))
After warm-up 1.3 mmol (that’s almost baseline),
Intensity at the VT1 level was almost perfectly confirmed by lactate — 1.6 mmol, which is exactly the range of the top of zone 2 (1.7–1.9 mmol).
Heart rate didn’t change by a single beat.
VE practically didn’t change, even decreased slightly — it was hard for me to get back to a fresh state. However, BR/VT followed my RPE (5>7).
Overall, this turned out not to be an “easy long” stroll. I got 18% of the stress dose in the last interval, out of the entire working time of that interval.
. I don’t know how some folks keep on using strips like it is chips ;-).
