Hello everybody,
Comfortable start, grueling final pace
The training of African top runners gives a first hint to the answer. It has never been heard that these runners start running quickly and then slacken off sharply. On the contrary. Many runs begin as leisurely as with a coffee chat, gradually get rolling, get faster and faster, until the strongest of the day strikes an almost grueling final pace. This is how Kenyans train and their success proves them right. But is there more to this dramaturgy than the momentum of a strong training group? Is there a physiological basis for the success of a progressive pace of training?
Yes, says modern sports science. The secret lies in the mobilization of the muscle fibers. In the "running muscles" the persistent, so-called "red" (also called ST, Slow Twitch) work together with the fast-growing "white" (also called FT, Fast Twitch) muscle fibers. With moderate stress, only the ST fibers are used to provide energy. The fast FT fibers are spared because the body reserves them for more demanding tasks. But he can only do this as long as the ST fibers that have to take over the work are not tired.
Changed energy supply
For a long time people wanted to know what the muscles do when these workers are no longer fully available. To do this, researchers even resorted to brutal methods. In test subjects on the ergometer, individual muscle parts were specifically anesthetized with curare, the arrow poison used by the South American Indians, to see how the rest of the muscles cope with this situation.
New studies by a research group from the “Copenhagen Muscle Research Center” are much gentler and more elegant. They let their subjects cycle on the ergometer for three hours. Pleasantly tired, they then had to fast for one night before the actual test began, which was very easy: 20 minutes of cycling at moderate speed. The test athletes were given muscle biopsies before and after exercise, which sounds worse than it is. The result: when rested, the FT fibers had nothing to do, the ST fibers did the work all by themselves. After the pre-exhaustion it looked different: with exactly the same load, a significant portion of the energy came from the valuable FT fibers. With unchanged intensity, the FT fibers became more and more involved with increasing duration.
The results of the Danish researchers make it clear that the supply of energy in the working muscles is completely different when you start a run at a given pace when you are rested or after you have been tired later in the run. A training run that is started slowly and gradually gets faster and faster creates a bow wave of pre-exhaustion in the legs: at any speed, muscle parts are activated that would only be addressed by a significantly higher speed in a rested state. This leads to a deep training stimulus.
Dr. van Aaken's "Crescendo"
Athletes and coaches have recognized this intuitively for a long time: The endurance pioneer Dr. Ernst van Aaken was a classical music lover. He named runs with steadily increasing speed "crescendo" after the volume swell in classical compositions. His protégé Harald Norpoth ran sharp 15 kilometers over twelve continuously accelerated laps on sandy ground in undulating terrain in training at the beginning of the sixties. The reward was Olympic silver over 5000 meters in 1964 in Tokyo. That was Kenyan training before the Kenyans knew it.
If you want to try this successful recipe yourself, we recommend a suitable round that you go through several times. For a lap two to three kilometers in length, the training scheme could look like this: first lap comfortable warm-up, second lap easy tightening, third lap brisk pace (marathon race pace), fourth lap force until you almost feel like you're racing. Fifth round ditch.
This training variant can also be carried out on a large lap with pulse control. The prerequisite is good knowledge of your personal training heart rates. Based on the heart rate at the anaerobic threshold, a progressive training run could look like this: 20 min running in, 12 min at 85 percent of the heart rate at the anaerobic threshold, 12 min at 95%, 12 min at 100-105%, 10 min running out. The masters in their field no longer accelerate step by step, but increase their running intensity continuously over the course of the training run. "