Sports performance diagnostic results - please help me interpret
Got my first ever sports performance diagnostic done today – apparently I've never run easy in my life. Would love you to analyse my data and tell me if I'm interpreting it correctly.
Background: 35M, running for about 2 years, recently ran a 1:28 HM. Goal is sub-3 at a marathon this autumn.
How the test works:
The test was carried out under professional clinical conditions at a hospital's sports medicine department, supervised by a sports medicine physician. You run on a treadmill starting at 6 km/h, with the speed increasing by 2 km/h every 3 minutes. After each stage a small blood sample is taken from your earlobe to measure lactate levels. Heart rate is monitored continuously throughout. The test ends when lactate starts rising exponentially – in my case at 18 km/h. The data is then used to calculate your individual thresholds and training zones.
The key numbers:
- Max HR: 184 bpm
- LT1 (aerobic threshold): 9.3 km/h / 6:26 min/km at 121 bpm – 1.15 mmol/l
- IAS at 2.65 mmol/l: 13.4 km/h / 4:29 min/km at 156 bpm
- Lactate at 2.0 mmol/l: 12.2 km/h / 4:54 min/km at 146 bpm
- Lactate at 3.0 mmol/l: 13.8 km/h / 4:21 min/km at 159 bpm
- Lactate at 4.0 mmol/l: 14.8 km/h / 4:03 min/km at 165 bpm
- VO2max (calculated): 57 ml/min/kg
- VLaMax: 0.77 mmol/l/s
My easy pace should apparently be slower than 6:26/km at under 120 bpm. I've been running what I thought were easy runs at 5:00–5:20/km. Every single one was deep in the grey zone at 130–145 bpm without me realising it.
So for 2 years I've basically never had a true easy run. Which explains the high VLaMax – my body never learned to primarily burn fat.
My interpretation:
I need to spend the next months running almost exclusively under 120 bpm to bring my VLaMax down from 0.77 to ideally around 0.45–0.50. Is this correct? And is there anything else in the data I'm missing or misinterpreting?
Feel like I've been training hard for 2 years without ever actually training correctly.