Heart Rate Zones

Anyone who says that running is boring has no idea what they are talking about. Most of the time my head is blown trying to understand running and how to get better. Slow long run, steady state run, hill runs, tempo runs, intervals, and threshold runs. Forget any kind of questions around whether it is good for the joints, or does not burn fat, or any other stuff that nobody normal can really qualify. All exercise is personal, and all exercise is beneficial. End of, so pick your poison ‘cause you’ll probably live a longer and better life if you are doing something. Here’s feckin hoping anyway!!
Whatever you do, it will require some kind of selfishness because if you want to get better at something, or you want to see improvements then ultimately you are going to have to commit more time, for me the opportunity cost is supporting my family. So, I started off like many, thinking “I’ll just go for a run, get the heart rate up, burn off a bit of fat, take my mind of my problems, whatever…” Then you get a fitbit or Garmin, start timing yourself and you think, oh, I better run more often as I want to get better. Then, before you know it, you need to do a Long run at the weekend, 2 easy runs and some hill sprints each week, just so as you can progress and not get beat by the 9 year old in the Parkrun on Saturday!! Annoying, but also kind of interesting and motivating.
So, I am going to talk about my week. I have 3 opportunities to do a run. Tuesday & Thursday is a 40 minute opportunity, and then hopefully 1 slot at the weekend, which realistically I can take about 1 Hour 30 minutes. The easy thing to do is just get out there and run steady state run at 6m per km as an average, which on the Tuesday and Thursday means i get just over 6km in each run. All good, in layman’s terms; gets the heart rate up, helps general aerobics, and burns off a few calories. However, it does not seem to be improving my Parkrun performance which is what I measure myself against (race conditions you see….). When I run the 6k Tuesday Thursday (now called T&T), I am verging into Threshold territory. I wouldn’t call it Threshold as I think I can push it a bit more, and it also feels pathetic to have a Threshold Run at 6 min average. I have done a Threshold test and was closer to 5min per Km. When I did the Threshold test, I was in Zone 5 & Zone 4, 71% of the run, and that included a warm up km and a cool down km. On a T&T Zone 4 & 5 for 67% of the time. I better put this in a table so I can review the data more clearly.

I have tabled my T&T run, a threshold run with warm up and warm down, a stride repeat, and a long run. Interestingly, I spend very little time in zone 2 on any of these runs. I do spend a lot of time in Zone 3 on the long run. I think this could be attributed to general fitness rather than a deliberate attempt to slow the pace down.
Now that I have had a look at my current heart rate zones, so what? Well the what are all to do with a thing called Mitochondria? I am not going to give you the scientific breakdown on this, I am not even going to give you the GCSE science breakdown on this. I am learning al the time, but I am most definitely not an expert so if you are looking for the skinny on this then wrong site. However, a little bit of knowledge is useful if you want to get better so am going to open myself up and let you know where I am at with it.
Mitochondrial is a big word, and I don’t like it. So, going forwards I am going to call them the Mits. The Mits are tiny entities in the muscle cells that take sugar & Calcium and combine them together into a compound which has a name you will likely never remember. Then in the presence of oxygen that is in the blood interact to form a second compound called ATP, this compound is needed to create energy. So, there are 2 things to consider here. How can I get more mits, and how can I get more oxygen into the blood. More Mits then more ATP, and more oxygen then more ATP. As you will learn later, it is tricky to get more mits and oxygen by doing the same training runs.
So, we know that Mits are tiny entities in the muscle cells. However, there are 2 types of muscle cells: Slow twitch (Type 1), and Fast twitch (Type 2). Mits are mostly found in type 1. The way to create more muscles is to work those particular muscles, right? So, if you go out and do a load of sprinting, you will not be working the type 1 muscles, and so you will not be producing more Mits. Go slower and you will be using the slow twitch muscles and so you will be producing more mits.
This brings us nicely on to heart rate zone training. If you train in zone 2, then you will defo just be using the slow twitch muscles and so you will be creating more muscles that create more mits and so you have a great chance of creating more energy. When I look at my long run stats above, I can see that I am only in zone 2 for 1% of the time. I was significantly more in zone 3 which is abnormal compared to the other runs. I may have been using more of the slow twitch muscles but I categorically think I need to really slow down on my long runs, and maybe some of the other runs. I read that 75% of your training should be in zone 2, although that probably depends on how much training you do, and what the other runs are like…..