Run Training Zones

In order to estimate your lactate threshold level and determine your running zones you will more often than not conduct a 30 minute time trial. Ideally, you’d do this time trial when you’re not fatigued by heavy exercise the day before. Use a level track, level road, or a treadmill set at 1% incline and use a heart rate monitor.

1. Start with a warm up of 15 minutes, mainly easy jogging with 3 or 4 short accelerations up to your approximate 5km race pace
2. Begin the 30 minute time trial. Press start on your phone or watch and run at your fastest consistent pace for 30 minutes. In other words, run at the fastest pace you think you can maintain for the entire test. After you’ve completed the 30-minute test, stop your timer.

After the test is finished, look to see what your average pace was across the entire 30 minutes. This is your new threshold running pace.

To work out your Lactate Threshold Heart Rate (LTHR):

After the test is complete review the data and separate the last 20min of the test. The data from the back 20min represents your LTHR.

To make it easier to pull the data outside of Training Peaks you can press split on your watch 10min into the test so that it isolates the last 20min data on your watch.

Using your LTHR, you can determine training zones (remember, LTHR is not the same as max heart rate in these training zones!):

• Recovery Zone (Zone 1) = 65-85% LTHR
• Long endurance (Zone 2) = 85-90% LTHR
• Intense Endurance (Zone 3) = 90-95% LTHR
• Lactate threshold (Zone 4) = 95-102% LTHR (or same heart rate as time trial)
• Maximal/power training (Zone 5) = 102-110%

You can now enter these values into your Tridot Threshold History screen.

Find help for doing this here.