An extremely experienced coach contacted me recently about his (female) athlete who had reached top regional level on the track over 1500m and 3000m last summer. His athlete had done a full winter’s aerobic preparation, with some good winter races. Despite a good block of early season hill work and VO2 max work (longer intervals with short or equal recovery), and some promising early-season results, she wasn’t able to tap into her high-output glycolytic anaerobic stores in races.

She described the feeling as “I felt as if I couldn’t get at my energy reserves” and “I felt as if I could’ve done it again, straight away”. The athlete is a hard-working girl who has a good head for racing, so she was quite disheartened to “go off the boil” coming into National Championships.

A possible answer here is that some athletes just don’t have a very big glycolytic/ anaerobic “tank”. So we have to tread carefully when prescribing for these athletes. They can be very fast over 100m, showing a good endowment of IIB fast twitch fibre, and they can be very competitive aerobically, showing a good endowment of Type I slow twitch fibre. They can have a high oxygen uptake, and the heart of a champion racehorse, but they can’t nail those glycolytic reps and come back smiling. There seems to be a deficiency of trainable IIA (glycolytic / oxidative) muscle fibre and so the lactate tolerance system can be overloaded very easily. This DOESN’T mean that an athlete with this challenge can’t compete at the very top level: it just means that she has to control training efforts well and hoard the lactate tolerance “reservoir” till race day. If the reservoir is depleted, it can’t be accessed, can it?

If she’s one of these, then she shouldn’t be doing sets of fast 800m-pace glycolytic/lactate tolerance reps really (ie: 300s/ 400s/500s @ race-pace). Try two or three sets of threshold-pace steady state lapping ( ie: 1200m) before 2-3 reps with good recovery over 150-200m @ 800 pace. Just dipping into the high-power output lactic tank a tiny bit without killing it. That has been shown to solve this particular problem with an international level female 800m athlete who is similarly challenged but can ‘kick’ with the best of them.

One tip for athletes like this is to make sure that each week or training cycle in track season includes scheduled steady efforts of 2-5 km on the track at higher aerobic levels or even at anaerobic threshold, as well as paying attention to VO2 Max. It pays to look back at training diaries to see how athletes respond to their sessions. You may have to fiddle around a little bit to get it right.

One of our good male athletes, Daniel, had run 50s for 400m and 1:52 for 800, and 3:45 for 1500m before Christmas off VO2 type training on Tuesdays, then went off the boil in the new year when he started bringing in glycolytic reps. So despite his speed potential, his system just seemed to rebel with the fast hard reps at 800 and 1500 pace. He went back to his pre-Christmas form when we steadied him off with Tuesday sessions starting with legspeed drills, then adding 4-6 laps of steady running at his threshold pace (about 3:15 per kilometre), then 3-4 x 800 or 1000 at VO2 pace (for him, about 2:50 per km, or 2:20 per 800m). Anything like fast 300s or 400s or 500s killed him!