The need for speed…

I had an interesting discussion today with one of the people working for/with the federation today concerning long distance running and speed/weight training.

Interesting because both of us agreed that speed will always be a limiting factor…

to any athletes, whereas the endurance is the element where you can have the most improvement. That is 99% of athletes will get much, much better from just doing the endurance work better but at the ultimate end of this you will also have a limitation in the speed area (not speed endurance, but pure speed).

Problem with especially weight training, is that when you are very aerobic trainined and the muscular adaption is to long distance running you will in most cases experience a loss of endurance when doing so not only because of the local lactatic acid accumulation during that work but also because of a reduction in general circulation.

I have managed to a fair degree to balance this, with much help from Leif Olav but still it is very, very difficult to get it 100 % right.
It was much easier when I was a middle distance runner or a moderate long distance athletes. But when the margines are like now, you have absolutely nothing to lose from on the endurance side.

So we are spending some time this fall doing some easy drills to get into a pattern of training that may help this element without losing out on the other stuff. Quite interesting actually.

We started working on this back in 2001 and have been through many models. It will be fun data to look back on when I have more time to reflect over the last years work (maybe in a few years when it will all be gathered together). 🙂

Treadmill running again, as it was snowing quite hard yesterday. Which is fine sometimes in between the other sessions.

All well !

Marius