[uphill_dhamma]

hi everybody,

I’m writing you just from the eye of the storm: north of Italy.

we’re obviously locked home, trying to reduce as minimal as possible any social contact.
as u can imagine, for a person used to log 10h outdoor sport/week, its quite tough 🙂

for this reason I stopped my training plan and, after a recovery week, I switched into maintenance mode: I got a treadmill.

I hope this thread will be useful to anybody facing these strange times.

I would like to know your opinion on this.
especially, elaborate more on the following points:

– general:
is this a good tool to maintain a certain volume during the week? what do you think about this?

– speed accuracy:
this is the issue everybody with a TM has to live with. in my case, mine is an average quality one: it can go up to 20kmh with 15% incline. anyway I spent sometime doing various measurements and calculation in order to know what is the REAL speed compare to the one set on the TM display. now I know that I can reach exactly 18kmh (03:20/km).. which is quite good.

– incline:
i always set 2% incline to compensate the lack of headwind.

– effort:
I always wear an HR strap.. and I surprisingly find some combinations really demanding.
e.g. 60min at 12kmh with 15% incline it’s quite tuff..
is this due to a constant grade compared to the variation on a normal uphill road (some downhill sections, etc)?

–elevation
i would like to log also some numbers about the total elevation gain during these treadmill weeks.
does this make sense?
for example, with the same wo described above (60min at 12kmh with 15% incline), doing some math it corresponds to about 1785m D+

– mental training
long story short: i believe that logging hours staring at a wall can be seen as a kind of mental training: the day i’ll get out of the door again anything will be fun & easy 🙂 🙂

– workouts idea
as the title says: any suggestion for a mountain runner?

thanks for your comments

Topic

[PaulB]

PaulB on March 18, 2020 at 11:25 am #39674

Hi,

I spent most of the winter on a treadmill because it was the only way I could get much “uphill” in my training. I live near a hilly area but I can’t access the hills during my weekday training window. With so much training on a treadmill, I had a lot of time to think about those exact questions and here’s my thoughts.

It seems to be an okay way to maintain a certain volume and even build volume. You certainly miss out on the effects of the uneven surface of the trail but I compensated as best I could by doing specific hip and glute work, lateral hops, Icky Shuffle, etc. I would also do “side shuffles” on the treadmill every few minutes. It’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing.

For elevation, going “uphill” on a treadmill is great but you miss the downhill. I did some backward running/walking to compensate for that, even though it was not anywhere near as much as I would have gotten outdoors. Not perfect but better than nothing. For logging elevation, I keep an Excel sheet because I’m on a free TP account and I kept a separate column for treadmill elevation separate from my outdoor elevation because most of it on the treadmill was “uphill” and not up/down so you get more “ascent” during the same workout time.

For my TSS, I used a fudge factor of 3 TSS/1k ft “climbed”. The normal fudge factor is 10/1k ft climbed/descended but the treadmill is mostly climbing so I missed out on the eccentric part of the run/walk so I guessed about 5 TSS/1k “climbed”. Then, because the treadmill is moving under my feet I adjusted downward a little bit more and came up with 3. It’s not scientific but it seems to work and roughly match up with an outdoor workout. Depending on how much sideways and backward running you do, maybe 2 or 4 would work but 3 worked for me.

The mental part is the hardest but there’s always podcasts!

Paul

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on March 19, 2020 at 12:56 pm #39689

– general:
is this a good tool to maintain a certain volume during the week? what do you think about this?

Yes, for sure, especially if it’s an incline trainer that can go to steep angles. SOme go as high as 40%.

– speed accuracy:
this is the issue everybody with a TM has to live with. in my case, mine is an average quality one: it can go up to 20kmh with 15% incline. anyway I spent sometime doing various measurements and calculation in order to know what is the REAL speed compare to the one set on the TM display. now I know that I can reach exactly 18kmh (03:20/km).. which is quite good.

Excellent. It’s great that you found that out. Also check the speed at higher inclines. I have a NordicTrack i11, and the accuracy is horrible. And it gets worse at high inclines. For example, at 25%, it runs 16-19% faster than the speed it displays.

– incline:
i always set 2% incline to compensate the lack of headwind.

I would go even steeper if you’re training for trail running.

– effort:
I always wear an HR strap.. and I surprisingly find some combinations really demanding.
e.g. 60min at 12kmh with 15% incline it’s quite tuff.. is this due to a constant grade compared to the variation on a normal uphill road (some downhill sections, etc)?

Again, check the speed.

–elevation
i would like to log also some numbers about the total elevation gain during these treadmill weeks.
does this make sense?
for example, with the same wo described above (60min at 12kmh with 15% incline), doing some math it corresponds to about 1785m D+

Wouldn’t it be 1,800m per hour? 12,000 * .15?

– mental training
long story short: i believe that logging hours staring at a wall can be seen as a kind of mental training: the day i’ll get out of the door again anything will be fun & easy ? ?

– workouts idea
as the title says: any suggestion for a mountain runner?

Yes, stop training by heart rate. Start training by pace. Do a gradual 20′ ramp up in speed to AeT HR at 15 percent (over several workouts for the best results). Then start training at different percentages of AeT for your workouts. Then do a 30-45′ time trial (after an adequate warm-up) to determine AnT pace.

Once you have your threshold paces, you can ignore heart rate as a training intensity. (But still record it so Training Peaks can calculate the TSS.)

As mountain athletes, we’re stuck with HR because of changes in the terrain and the lag of heart rate in adjusting, but training by pace will be much more effective. If you can stand the monotony, it could be a very productive period in your training.

Other things that help:

* I find steady-state workouts the hardest because they are so damn boring. Podcasts, Netflix, etc will help for easy steady-state sessions. For harder sessions, do them in an interval format.

* After a season of treadmill training, I actually prefer the treadmill for intensity. It taught me a lot about what different paces feel like at the start of an interval. Spoiler: they’re always easier than I would have guessed.

* For downhill work, elevate the back of the treadmill. You can use an inclinometer app on your phone to fine-tune the desired grade. (Note that the speed will probably be off, it may strain the motor, and it’s probably against your warranty conditions.)

* The best way to train “durability” (even if you were able to run outside) is to use muscular endurance training. Try our gym ME program. ME also really helps with downhill strength.

[Chris Ingram]

Chris Ingram on April 2, 2020 at 12:16 pm #40080

This is fantastic information! Scott, I was hoping to ask a follow-up question regarding aerobic training by pace. I recently got access to a treadmill and would like to shift to training by pace rather than HR for some of my aerobic runs. I am looking for clarity on the whole issue of drift.

Keeping pace the same, we know the HR is going to drift upwards. When I run by HR, I have to slow down as the run gets longer to account for the drift to make sure that I am staying below AeT HR. It seems to me that doing an AeT run (say 2 hours) at a specific pace on the treadmill would result in my HR being above my calculated AeT HR for at least a portion of the run. Is this OK? Or is AeT pace specifically set somewhere below the HR threshold to account for drift?

I apologize if this has been asked before, but I haven’t been able to find a lot of information on calculating an AeT pace either here on the forums or in TftUA.

Thanks for any guidance/tips/resources you can provide!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on April 2, 2020 at 2:00 pm #40086

After a gradual warm-up, whatever speed you can maintain for 60 minutes with less than 5% drift in heart rate is one measure of your aerobic threshold pace. As aerobic capacity improves, both the speed and duration can increase.

An even better test would be in a lab and/or with a lactate meter.

Either way, once you have a reliable measure of your AeT pace, then heart rate is less important. Compare the idea to weight lifting. How often are strength prescriptions done by heart rate? Never. The weight being lifted is a better measure of the stimulus. Pace is the “weight” that we need to measure. But for mountain athletes in changing terrain, pace changes all the time and RPE is unreliable. So we go by heart rate to be conservative.

[uphill_dhamma]

uphill_dhamma on April 2, 2020 at 3:06 pm #40089

hi everybody,

thanks a lot for all these precious answers and tips!
since here in Italy we are on total lockdown my treadmill love story goes on.

I am really curious about how my fitness level will be once we’ll start getting outside again when this crazy thing is gone..

It’s now my 3rd week of training only on the treadmill.
One thing I’m quite sure of: I kinda built lots of mental stamina during these wall/ipad staring weeks 🙂