Training results

This morning I was back at ZeLD, the centre for performance diagnostics, which is part of the University of Sports in Cologne. Those sports scientists have set up my training schedule for the London marathon and today we wanted to see how effective it has been so far.

I had to repeat the performance test that I took in September 2005 before the training started. The test monitors the heart rate, respiration and lactate at gradually increased running pace. I had to run on the treadmill for 5 minutes, wearing a respiratory mask and a pulse watch, both connected to a computer. When the 5 minutes were up, my trainer took a blood sample to check the lactate (he enjoyed that ... little vampire ... I am sure somewhere in his family tree there is Count Dracula). After that I had to run for another 5 minutes, only faster. And again, even faster. And so on, until I couldn't go on anymore.

The measured values are processed by a special software and a lot of fascinating ratios are calculated. Being a mathematician, I love the output! Lots of tables, charts and ratios!

I have entered the measured values for heart rate and lactate from both September 2005 and today in Excel. As jpegs the graphs do not look as good as I thought they would, but you can get an idea of where I have improved and where I haven't. The blue line is the heart rate, the pink line is the lactate.

This is September 12th, 2005:

And this is today, January 19th, 2006:

You can see that the heart rate is almost unchanged, which surprised my trainer a bit. The lactate is lower now at the slower paces than it was in September, but we haven't managed to push this "to the right". A very unscientific way to say that I am currently not able to run long distances fast. So my trainer is going to revise the training schedule to improve my staying power at higher speed.

Overall I have managed to reduce the estimated time needed for the marathon by 20 minutes in about 4 months. If I was going to run the marathon today, it would take me 4 hours, 30 minutes and 37 seconds. He thinks, we can further improve that by some 10 to 15 minutes. Now that's not bad, is it? My ambition was not to die and to run it in less than 5 hours. Looks like that can be done...