That's the chart. I blow that thing out of the water. My MAF was not even close to being on the chart when I hit a time close to the 5k time listed for 10mm. Now that I am getting back into things, I would expect the same to be true. My guess it that my sex has something to do with it, but in reality it could be a number of things. When I was in track in HS, I generally did out perform what my practices indicated I could do also. I would also point out that my max HR is way up there, so that could give me an extra gear that others just do not have. But this is just me, I don't fit well in anyone's box. I will take a smoothie. Got a tropical flavor?

Noakes points out that women have an advantage as far as endurance sports are concerned. It's somewhere in Lore of Running. .

Thanks Rudolf for clarifying where the RQ deflection point is, namely at 0.85 or 50/50 - I had not understood this before you explained it. In my mind I envisioned an exponential graph after the deflection point but I am glad you pointed out the graph can be linear after that though at a steeper grade....

Just started to read this thread, and I'm not sure what everyone is saying about the "deflection point" and the RQ (RER) vs HR graph. If you plot RQ vs HR, what is called the "deflection point" is (in our old math teacher's terminology) the point at which the second derivative has a local maximum, i.e. the point at which the slope increases somewhat suddenly. This is not necessarily at an RQ of 0.85 . For example, mine occurs at about 0.76, and I've met people with other values too (higher values.) It all depends on one's aerobic fitness and training, etc, etc. Different people can have different graph shapes. Mine was easy to interpret because it stays mostly flat up to that deflection point area and then rises somewhat linearly up to my AT (RQ = 1.0) One caveat for folks who aren't familiar with my old-time posts: I've seen a few results from good-quality VO2 tests, and I'm a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the "accuracy" of the "180 formula". One coach I know, who insists that all who train under him have a quality VO2 test before starting, says "formulas don't work". Just FWIW.

Good luck with it, Jimmy...I forget just how difficult it is to stay disciplined in this "patience" phase! But we all know the rewards. Plus I like it when Jesse says that he basically trains at below his MAF because he's lazy ...I like his results. If I stayed at MAF-5, I'd be running (or walking real slow) at 118, according to my age....so I stuck with Maffetone's keep the MAF rule and added to that by deciding to train at -10 to what I've been training at, which was 140. I came to 140 because it just got to be so easy and comfortable at that pace...and the benefit was that I got another finish at Hardrock 100 last year. One funny story....I was walking along at around mile 80 up around 13,000 feet when me and this guy sortof hooked up. We started talking and found that we were both doing low HR training and came to realize that if we could just maintain a 3 mph walking pace, we'd start catching people. We were catching and passing people who were running..it was great. So it pays to learn to walk efficiently. I hope to be more regular here....just been incredibly busy trying to get my house ready to sell so I can move back to NM. Steve BTW: I may have created this forum, but it was just an extension of what was going on over at Coolrunning. The people here at RA wanted something similar, so I created it. This is actually a spinoff of the 2000 mile club, which I left because it became the Nashville running club