So I just ran my longest distance race which was a half. And also I think this is the first race that i really ran hard. Looking back, I think that in my (few) prior races i was too cautious and left time on the course.

Anyway, while running this race, I felt a lot of aerobic stress, more than in any of my training runs (even the speed work). And I was actually uncomfortable with this feeling! And I realized that most of my training is anaerobic and that I very rarely if ever push myself to that level of aerobic stress in my training, and if i do, it's never for more than a minute or 2.

During and after the race I wondered if i could have done better if I'd focused more on  threshold training before the race (And I'm talking about this specifically, not just speedwork in general).

So my question to everyone is how important is it, in your opinion  to train specifically in this way? Because i look at some people's logs and they are pretty fast, yet all they seem to do is easy runs (and yes, those "easy" runs are at a pace I would consider fast, but I'm assuming they are not aerobically challenging for these folks).

I may be transposing the meaning of anaerobic  and aerobic. And i was a bio major for a year!

Yeah, i mean the opposite. I mean I rarely am fighting for breath or feeling my heart pound

Edit:So I looked it up and it seems that I'm probably misusing a bunch of terms. I guess to answer this question just ignore everything i say about my own training and just answer the question i seem to be asking.

Bear with me.  Let's start with the aerobic/anaerobic thing.

When you move your body, the energy to do so will come from either aerobic or anaerobic pathways.  Anaerobic means "without oxygen" so it seems nearly self-evident that your muscles can't exercise without oxygen for very long.  Still, they can for a while because survival may require quick, intense bursts of activity and your body doesn't know it's not trying to survive out on the African savanna 30,000 years ago.  When you think about running, go out and run a 40 yard dash as hard as you can.  I mean an all out, everything you have in you sprint.  If you do that, nearly all of your energy will come from anaerobic pathways.  At the other end of the spectrum, go run a marathon as hard as you can.  With the possible exception of putting on a feeble sprint in the last 100 yards, nearly all of your energy will come from aerobic pathways.  If a 40 yard dash uses anaerobic pathways almost exclusively, and a marathon uses aerobic pathways almost exclusively, the implication is that, at some point, your energy will come roughly 50% from aerobic and 50% from anaerobic pathways.  It turns out that around two minutes is that magic point.  So, if you go out and run for two minutes as hard as you can, roughly half of your energy will come from anaerobic pathways and half from aerobic pathways.

That's aerobic and anaerobic.  Unfortunately, bad terminology has stuck around.  What people refer to as the "anaerobic threshold" is really the "lactate turnpoint."  When you exercise aerobically, and lactate is an aerobic product, your body generates lactate.  The old "lactic acid" used to be blamed for all kinds of woes including DOMS.  It turns out that lactate is crucial to the aerobic energy cycle.  As exercise intensity increases, both your production and your consumption of lactate increases.  At some point though, as you continue to increase the intensity of your exercise, you will produce more lactate than you consume.  This is the "lactate turnpoint."  It used to be thought that your lactate production kept increasing past the lactate turnpoint but newer evidence seems to suggest that your ability to use lactate as a fuel decreases as your intensity reaches a certain point.  Regardless, past that level of intensity, lactate will begin to accumulate in your body fairly rapidly.  You experience this as the muscular burn and fatigue in those shorter races.  Here is why you should care.

You have a maximum ability to use oxygen.  That's your VO2max.  An average adult might have a VO2max of around 40.  An elite athlete may have a VO2max in excess of 80.  Although I haven't had mine measured, it's probably about 50.  You can improve your VO2max through training but there is some evidence that it doesn't really improve much after the first couple of years.  You also have a velocity VO2max.  At some point, as you speed up, you will hit your VO2max.  That's not your maximum speed.  It's just that you won't use more oxygen than that even if you do speed up.  So, let's call that your vVO2max.

Your lactate turnpoint will be some percentage of your vVO2max regardless of whether you are a couch potato or a world class endurance athlete.  However, one of the major differences between professional endurance athletes and recreational runners and couch potatoes is that percentage.  A professional may have a lactate turnpoint somewhere in the neighborhood of 85% of his/her vVO2max.  That's why Ryan Hall's marathon pace is only 30-40 seconds per mile slower than his 5K pace while mine is more like 60-70 seconds slower.  Rather than a lactate turnpoint 85% of vVO2max, my lactate turnpoint is probably more like 70% of vVO2max.  A couch potato really struggles.  His lactate turnpoint may be under 50% of his vVO2max.

Remember the couple of years to max your VO2max?  Well, you can continue working on your lactate turnpoint for 5-8 years.  In other words, you can continue moving your lactate turnpoint closer to your vVO2max.  So, while your VO2max may not be improving, you can improve your resistance to fatigue and you can run faster.  How do you improve your lacate turnpoint?  The simple answer is tempo runs.

You will frequently hear of the "lactate threshold" pace as the pace at which you could race for about an hour.  For very, very good runners, this is about half marathon distance.  For probably the majority of recreational runners, this is more like 10K or 12K.  What you want to do is to stress your body's ability to burn lactate without going over the edge.  This means those hard tempo runs lasting 20-40 minutes.  There are a nearly infinite variety of tempo runs and cruise intervals.  Cruise intervals involve running 1-2 mile intervals at tempo pace with 1-2 minute breaks.  I use them early in a training cycle to work on my lactate turnpoint without putting a lot of stress on my body.  You don't really want to do tempo runs in excess of 40 minutes because then you're putting race level stress on your body.  Remember that a tempo run is the pace at which you could race for an hour and you don't normally want to race in training.  The idea is to exercise at an intensity that is just barely below your lactate turnpoint.  You can get this measured in a lab but that "comfortably hard" pace for 30 minutes ends up being damned accurate.  Or, you can use my guideline which is that I like to finish a tempo run thinking I could have run 1 more mile at that level of effort if my life depended on it but I'm very, very glad I don't have to do so.  (You can also do silly things like plugging in a recent race time into a VDOT calculator if you want to get all technical and stuff.  If you haven't visited that site, I highly recommend it).

Link to VDOT Calculator.

Don't get me wrong.  There is an important place for 60-90 minute hard runs in your training program but those are marathon pace runs and you use them to build resistance to fatigue and mental strength rather than using them to increase your lactate turnpoint.

I agree with LTH's explanations and more importantly the things he said about tempo runs. Many people hate them (myself included) but they are SO crucial to improvement. I have discussed them with other guys that are in my running club and we also agree with the time frame for running tempos--usually 20-40 minutes. I usually stay more around 20 minutes.

Also 30 minute runs don't give you much of an aerobic base. (Disclaimer: I have not actually looked at your log, this is based on a previous post). In my base phase, which was 12 weeks, I would do runs of 1.5 hours twice a week, and a long run of 2 hours once per week, and fill in three other days of running. The difference in that and previous years was very noticeable as far as my aerobic fitness felt.

LTH explanation - 

Most, 80%+, of your training should be aerobic - as LTH defines it.  But if you can run ~10% of weekly miles near that lactate threshold/turnpoint, it's critical to build endurance at speed, and to drive the LT point to a faster speed.   An even smaller portion of miles at sub-10K or sub-5k speed is more than enough to deal with VO2Max improvement and sustain it.  However, the biggest benefit of the fastest paces can be to allow the body to find it's most efficient running form.   Even experienced runners can make gains

Run a lot.  Mostly easy, a small portion fast.

And +1 to comments that 2 30 minute runs don't help as much as a single 1-hour run.

ok wow. I'm going to read all this after dinner. Thanks guys!!

Yours is much more... poetic!  Well done.

That's almost like my running haiku:

 

Run some runs harder

Between hard runs, run easy

Rest.  Then run again.

Great thread. I loved LTH's post. All the biochemical stuff is still pretty elusive to me, but one (simple) thing I have heard which always rings true is the value of running on tired legs. You get warmed up, you run long enough to get over the novelty of it, you run until you feel that there's only so much in left inside you, then you run more/harder. In that state, your body REALLY pays attention to what is efficient. If the tiniest little tweak to form/pace/stride gives a 0.1% advantage, you body takes notice and remembers. I don't run fast at all (yet) but I do a lot of uphill. And the biggest help I've found is running uphill when I'm totally spent. Usually what happens is that I want to slow down and give in. But if some miniscule adjustment makes it easy to speed up, it's like I just won bigtime at Vegas : flashing lights, confetti, money shooting at me too fast to count, and unspeakably hot women sidling up and saying "ooh, baby ! you do that so good!" IOW, something deep inside you takes notice and remembers.

 

I think this happens whenever you push yourself to run farther OR faster on tired legs. But the big point, for me, is not just clocking miles. That is step #1. Pushing harder is step #2.

This is a great thread, and I haven't even had time to read it yet!

I would though, like to take the opportunity to say something now that I've said before but i feel like repeating.

One thing that I really miss about the old RW, although i wasn't there long, was the really and truly magical synergy between Brad, SRL, Mike, and George. I know that MJ5 is knowledgeable, and that Lily and Damaris have a lot of wisdom and that we have great and even an elite runner or two amongst us. So I do not mean to omit anyone in this statement.

But we had LTH, SRL, Moth and wcrunner, and these 4 guys are so different and come from completely different places. And the reasons they run are different. And the reasons they are great are different. And their attitudes towards running are all different.

I may be wrong but i don't think these guys like each other or ever did, and the rest of us have opinions about each of these guys as well that may or may not be purely positive.  But nevertheless, the threads that would come out of the discussions/disagreements or whatever were, in my opinion, priceless.

I wish that hadn't disintegrated.  But nothing lasts forever and you can't, as John Lennon said of the Beatles, rebake a souffle. And so it goes.

Just some thoughts. I'm going to read these comments and reply/ask follow up questions tomorrow.

Anyway, carry on all