What's your experience? I'm finding it OK, other than being passed by a dog with 3 legs , and the fact that my running now takes up a lot more of my spare time than it used to (I don't have much, what with a demanding job and a demanding 18 month old)...it's fine and I don't mind the slowness (mostly) as I am 44 and have had achilles problems in the past, so I can do goodish distance (building after a 2 year gap).

TIA

I know that sounds a bit cryptic, but I'm just curious - I've just dropped the HR I run at to MAF +/- a bit and thus my paces too, and I know that it can take 8-12 weeks to see the benefits, but what I was wondering was, will I gradually find my paces increasing at those HRs  - i.e. if I compare paces now and in 4 months time will I see a gradual increase, or will it happen suddenly?

What's your experience? I'm finding it OK, other than being passed by a dog with 3 legs , and the fact that my running now takes up a lot more of my spare time than it used to (I don't have much, what with a demanding job and a demanding 18 month old)...it's fine and I don't mind the slowness (mostly) as I am 44 and have had achilles problems in the past, so I can do goodish distance (building after a 2 year gap).

TIA

I can't tell you - the longest pure MAF period I've had was 6 weeks total.

in those 6 weeks, the pace improvement was like: when I started first workout was a 15mm pace, I went to do 6+ miles, my usual distance, and oh my f. god, it took significantly more than 1.5 hours..

within a few days, I improved to 14mm, which was more in line with my paces at higher HR's. I believe my body just needed to get used to this extra low HR.

after that, it took about 2 more weeks to improve to 13:20-13:30 or so, which was in line with my paces at high HR's before slight overtraining before I started MAF'ing. this was on 6 days per week of MAF'ing, 6-7-8 hours per week. you see, you got to increase training load in terms of miles if you don't want to get detrained... by the way, I didn't lose any speed, but maybe that's because I only did it for 6 weeks pure!

at this point, spring racing session arrived and I wanted to try some races as I'd never really done a race since starting regular training. so for 2 months I followed a mixed and quite disorganized training: 3-4-5 runs a week, as far as tapering for races and recovery after races would allow (not many races, one per month, but they were not very short races either). most of the runs were still at MAF, and a couple of tempo-ish runs and hill training and stuff like that, not more than once a week on average (plus the races on top of that). so anyway, I kept in touch with MAF and so I know that I improved my MAF pace to 12:50-13:00 first, then to 12:00-12:10. this was over the course of 6 weeks twice, i.e. 12 weeks. I mean it wasn't continuous improvement, more like jumps in every 6 weeks.

then I went back to base building mode, sortof as I started adding some Hadd LT-moving runs, but still a lot of MAF runs and the highest HR allowed is only 5-10 above it. and I also do some runs at a HR 10bpm lower than MAF.  I might have seen some improvement but haven't tested it much yet and with the summer days, my paces are all over the place, sometimes great, sometimes sucky. for example this week I've had MAF-3 at 12:00 (hey, MAF could have been like 11:40??), then another day this week I had MAF (no minus bpm) at 13:10, so I guess summer just sucks. ;P

the only things I'm sure about is that:

- aerobic base building takes a long time, you will get improvements here and there, not very gradual, more like in small jumps, you can have setbacks too (I did have some), but over a few long months, you should see a substantial difference in your fitness compared to when you started out.

- this stuff really helped in terms of avoiding injuries. my most peaceful time so far (i.e. without any  kind of small injury or anything) were those 6 weeks of pure MAF even though I did runs 6 days a week. and I feel my legs got stronger too. in terms of leg resistance to injuries I'm not so ready for highly anaerobic stuff yet, but one day I'll get there. I mean, I did not get truly injuried, but I did need extra recovery in the mixed period to avoid that.