Hard Efforts

The benefits of going hard

I noticed something this week in my training as I mixed in some hard efforts.  The relatively small amount of hard effort, in terms of time, has an outsized impact.

I’m going to walk you through what I mean by hard effort and talk about the outsized impact.

This is important to understand because it stands in contrast to what most of us would normally do in our day-to-day training.  It’s also a great way to get maximum benefit from a short workout if you are time constrained.

Most of us will fall into a routine of running X miles X days a week unless we have a specific race we are training for.   Don’t get me wrong, this is great, this means you have conquered the hardest impediment to becoming a lifelong endurance athlete – CONSISTENCY.

You should feel pretty good about yourself.  You consistently get out and run or bike 3-5 days a week and each of those days is let’s say 3 – 8 miles, with maybe a longer run on the weekend?  That’s great! You’ve won the game of life.

The thing these base building runs lack is variety and stress.  You body gets used to the cadence of your weekly mileage and adapts.  You maintain a certain level of core fitness but you’re not testing yourself.  And because you’re not testing your body it forgets how to respond to those tests.

When I’m in these periods of routine running cadence, I almost feel like I’m losing fitness.  Even though I’m running 30 miles a week or so I’m getting incrementally less benefit from those miles because my body has adapted to the process and no longer sees any stress.

I realized this because I’m currently watching my nutrition.  This means I weigh in every day and not only watch what I eat but also the impact of my workouts.

What did I see as the impact on my body?  Not much.  I see a pound or two of water loss but very little incremental calorie burn.  This is the first revelation.  I’m out in the woods running at my normal relaxed pace for an hour to an hour and a half and I see very little impact.

My theory is that my body is so acclimated to these types of runs that it is essentially a walk in the park.  No stress.  No ‘bounce’ as I like to say.  I can see that in the numbers.

It’s good for my head and helps maintain that fitness but does not stress the system much at all.

Then this week coach threw in a couple shorter tempo type runs.  Here’s the second revelation.  A one hour tempo paced run on the road gets much different results in the way my body responds.  A set of hill repeats or intervals does the same.

Why?  Because it is stressing my body in a different way.  It’ gets the furnace going and that furnace stays burning hot all day.

What does a tempo effort look like?  Anything with some sustained harder effort.  For example: a one hour step up run.  20 minute warm up, 20 minutes in Zone 3, 10 minutes hard, 10 minute cool down.  If you break that down I’m only spending 30 minutes of that hour in a tempo effort.

Another would be intervals.  Set your watch to buzz every X minutes and run race pace for 1-4 minutes then recover.  For the same amount – rinse and repeat.  Or do an out and back.  Go easy out to the ½ way, turn around and see if you can get back at race pace.

If you want to convert that from zones to paces…I’ll give it a try.  For me that zone 3 effort hovers around my marathon race pace, not that hard but you’re noticeably turning your feet over a bit faster and breathing a bit harder.  The Zone 4-5 bits at the end are about 30-45 seconds a mile faster than marathon pace, or about what I assume my 10K pace would be if I ever ran a 10K.

Hill repeats work the same way.  I won’t go through the details again, but it ends up being about 10 minutes of hard effort.  Really not that much.  All done in under an hour.

The big reveal is the impact.  I had been stuck at a plateau in my weight loss and these tempo workouts broke the plateau.  Even though they are shorter than my regular training runs, because they stress your body in a different way, they burn more calories.  And that burn has a hangover effect. The furnace gets kicked on and burns hot for a couple hours.

I would hypothesize that if all I was doing was tempo runs and then switched to a long zone 2 runs I ‘d get a similar bounce.  It has to do with the variability of the training and effort.  If you do too much of the same routine it gets stale and your body figures it out.  You have to mix it up to get your body to adapt.

Another thing I like about mixing in these hard workouts is that they make me feel good about myself.  There’s nothing like finishing one of these and feeling that pride of having done something worthy.  That mental boost, like the calorie burn, stays with your all day.

So…The ‘why do you care?’ takeaways:

1. Mixing in some shorter harder efforts with your easy runs will burn more calories.
2. If you’re time strapped these are a great way to maximize the benefits.
3. They cause an energy burn hangover that stays with you for a few hours.
4. The time of day can influence the impact of these runs, so play around with that.
5. These are great plateau busters.
6. Don’t do too much. The benefit will lesson and you risk injury.
7. Mentally it makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Have fun with it!