Doubles, Geeks, and Aldo

AM (thats right folks, 2 workouts today): 3.5 miles w/u in 25:25, gym session, 1.5 mile cool down.

This session has become a twice weekly staple since moving to Dublin. The benefits are that the resistance training should in theory help maintain my bone density and improve strength, and the mileage is low, stopping me from getting to carried away. Plus if there's any talent at the gym I get to have a good perve.

PM: I'll clarify, I am not doing doubles. But I did have an afternoon workout. Before I can start testing subjects for research, I need to know how to use the equipment etc involved in the research, as does the other 1st year PhD candidates. So it was my turn to be the guinea pig. The beauty of doing what I'm doing is that I can apply the data to my running. Here's where I get a little geeky, but its nothing an extra gigabyte of RAM can't fix (Under Siege, what a movie). I did an incremental test to exhaustion on the bike, starting at 60W and progressing 30W every 3 mins. I maxed out at the end of the 270W stage, with a HR at 196bpm. My VO2max was 49ml/min/kg, and my a-v O2 difference was 88%. What the fuck does that mean? I'll tell you, the heart rate was a little lower than I expected to get as I've often gone over 200bpm, but figure that was the effects of the gym this morning. The VO2max means that every kg of my lard-ass was consuming 49ml of O2 per minute. And the a-v O2 diff means that the working muscles were extracting 88% of the O2 available from the blood. The significance of this is it will give me a measure of my efficiency as a runner. For example, the last time I completed a proper VO2max test was way back in the days of yore, or 2000, when I had a VO2max of 72ml/min/kg. This tells me 2 things, that at present, part of the reason I'm down at 49ml is I'm a fattie, so there are more kg's to give O2 to. Additionally, I'm not as fit, so I'm not as efficient at using the O2 thats there. The fact that I'm extracting 88% of the available O2 is pretty good, which tells me I need to improve my aerobic capacity, which guess what, happens with running. Now there are a bunch of variables etc etc that I should consider, for example, this test was on a bike, not a treadmill like the last one, and I would be more efficient running, also that I was at the gym this morning so am not likely to have gotten to my max, but for where I am in my training right now, its a good starting point. Hopefully if all goes to plan between now and March I will do it again properly on the treadmill with a full lactate workup and design my marathon training program off the data. But for now, analysis of the data tomorrow will show me what HR I need to be running at to improve my aerobic capacity, and I'm guessing its in around the 150bpm that I've been trying to run at presently.

Also briefly, after reading DeCoste's blog, I spent way too much time procrastinating on GMAP measuring all my runs from home, and turns out they're pretty accurate for the most part, one or two of my longer ones from college (meaning I haven't run them in a few years) were a bit short, but in the main all's good in the hood.

Outside of running, read a great piece on the 'Irish' legend of John Aldridge. Didn't realise how totally underrated he was in general, if not just by me, although his best days were just a bit too early for me to appreciate. Still I think this was most definitely his greatest moment. 

That's all I got, peace.