I spent the morning at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine today to be with a new athlete joining the team as she did her running lactate threshold test.  She did a great job and reminded me of a very important strategy on pacing for endurance athletes.  I call it the boiling frog approach.  Here’s a little background……    I’ve noticed over the past few years of my training that I have some of my best workouts after putting in a different training session first followed by a small break.  For example, I often do one of my training runs early in the morning followed by a very short break to get a small bite to eat and then head to the pool for a swim set.  These have always been some of my absolute best swim workouts.  I’ve seen the same results with other combos as well……swim, small break, ride……etc.  When I first noticed this phenomenon, I remembered some research a coach brought up to me in college.  I can’t remember all the exact details but this track coach had a shortage of athletes at a track meet so, cruelly, he had a few of his throwing athletes, (Javelin, Shot…..), compete in the morning running races.  All of the athletes suffered through the runs and then went back to the hotel for a quick break.  About a half an hour later they came back to do their real events of discus, Javelin, and shot put.  Every single athlete broke their personal bests that day by huge amounts.  This of course caught the coaches attention and he traced it back to the running they did just before their events.  He was definitely on to something.  I still feel sorry for the shot putter out there trying to compete in a 400m dash!   Yet another example came to me when working with my coach, Neal Henderson, on pacing the marathon in an Ironman.  He instructed me to really hold back on the first 10km of the marathon.  “run as slow as you have to in order to feel relaxed and calm,” he told me.  Then at 10km very slowly raise the pace and hold it.  If possible very slowly raise it again at 20km.  I used his advice and broke my Ironman marathon record by almost 40minutes.  I have to mention here that my buddy and I used this same pacing technique on his mental breakthrough workout last week and he absolutely killed it!  The workout consisted of 3×10km done back to back with the first 10k in Z2, the second in mid Z3, and the 3^rd in high Z3 to low Z4.  He negative split each 10k, and ran the 3^rd 10k at a 3:05 marathon pace! Nice man!  So what the heck is going on here?…….The test with my athlete this morning kind of brought it all together for me.  Paul and I started her with her warm up at a relatively slow pace, but it was still clipping along.  After 20min we checked the lactate in her blood and noticed it was pretty high…..almost 3mmol.  Paul being the seasoned pro he is, brought her down to a walk for a few minutes and then started her back up again at a little bit slower pace.  After 4min her lactate had already dropped quite a bit.  Now she was just above 2mmol.  He decided he wanted to slow down just a little more.  Another 4 minutes and she was down to 1mmol and change.  At that point he started the test we all know and love with progressively faster paces and finger sticks.  After about 5 stages we were well passed the speed we originally started her at for her warm up, but the cool thing is that her lactate was still way below 3mmol.  If Paul wouldn’t have slowed her down and started again her body would have never caught up with the lactate production and she would have spiked her lactate way sooner than her true Lactate Threshold.    Okay…..I think I get it.  Basically there are two lessons here:  1. “if we start at a pace that is relatively too hard, we will never reach our true best pace later in the workout/race.”   Or another way to look at it is “slowly building lactate from a nice low amount will allow us to reach a much faster pace than spiking lactate and then trying to catch up.”    2.  “If we can rev up our bodies a bit and then back way off for long enough to let our bodies catch up with the lactate, when we go back to the hard pace we will usually start with a lower lactate and therefore be able to progress higher up the pace ladder before we reach threshold.”  Man…..that’s hard to put into words!  I hope that makes sense???????  Anyway, back to the boiling frog.  Legend has it that if you throw a frog into boiling water it will jump right out and you will go hungry.  But if you put the frog in cold water and let it get at home and then slowly crank up the heat it will be boiling before the frog realizes and jumps out……frog legs for you!  Thus, I now think of this as the boiling frog pacing strategy.                                                                                                                                      Until next time, shop at trisports.com using my discount code chowie-s, eat more powerbar, and tell your endurance family you love them.