Your Main Target Heart Rate - Zone 3

Tweet

Hitting Your Marathon To Sub Marathon Race Pace.

We are now hitting heart rates in between 160 and 175 for our runner,with max heart rate of 200. Which is 80 to 87.5 % of max heart rate among the five heart rate zones (you may read about all of these by clicking on the below menue)

This is a excellent target heart rate zone to train in for much of the really hard marathon training work that has to do done midways through a training cycle.

• First of all - you are training at a pace that gives you a training effect on the whole system.

• Second, you are training at a pace that you can keep on going at for a long time ; and "teach" your system to deal with the marathon training pace.

The Anaerobic Threshold - The Key To Success..

You are now training right below what is called your anaerobic threshold - an expert term of a special tipping point. Where you are just in balance of the oxygen you use versus the oxygen your breath in.

Training your anaerobic threshold is the #1 factor to marathon success !

Wonder why the Kenyan / African runners run so fast ? Well, the main reason for this is their extremely high anaerobic threshold, which results in an ability to keep on running very very fast for a very long time.

That fact applied to you as well - if you want to run faster in the longer distances - 5k and above - there is absolutely no way around it but to improve your anaerobic threshold.

The Zone 3 training zone is also great to combine with the Zone 1 easy work.

Remember ?

Zone 1 heart rate training zone is the real easy work, with heart rate below 140 for our runner.

Which Means For Example Sessions Like...

30-45 minutes easy running. Then straight into 20-25 minutes of Zone 3 training. Down to 10 minutes in Zone 1 again. Before finishing it up with 20 minutes in Zone 3.

See, what you are doing is skipping over Zone 2.

Go for the higher Zone 3 instead of Zone 2.

Zone 3 training should be a major part of your marathon plan and be well planned into any marathon or half marathon training schedule.

If done correctly it will give you a feeling of floating very near max speed that you probably haven't experiences before as a runner..

Moving forward. Faster work and into the Zone 4 - higher training heart rate, just above the target heart rate