Sunday 010409 17 miles and more altitude conversation

Didn't feel real hot - my stomach has been fighting some sort of something.  Decided to go long and real slow, real easy.   17 miles, looping up into Lafayette, Louisville, keep the HR in the low 150s.

Matt asked: "After reading the altitude post, I'm a little puzzled.  The point of training at altitude is to increase O2 carrying capacity and perhaps condition oneself if he is going to race at a similar alt?
And how high does one have to go to get the O2 benefits?

My nickel on this ... sleeping at altitude helps you increase O2 carrying capacity because your RBC count will increase.  But even with this increase RBC count, it does not offset the lack of the ability to get 02 to the muscle cells.  For an extreme example, even if you acclimate at 20000 feet for climbing Everest - you don't suddenly reach your sea level potential.  

Hence, the old adage, live high and train low.  I do think an exception to this is if you are racing high.  There the law of specificity over rules - train your system (body) unto which you will race. 

But even there, I think there is an exception.  If you train exclusively at altitude, you will lose speed that you train (better) at lower altitudes that you can use to your benefit in a race at higher altitudes.  In other words, if you want to run fast, you need to run fast.  Since you are limited in being able to do that by training at altitude, you set a governor of sorts if you always train at altitude.  This can be overcome (running downhill for example, at faster paces) with training lower as a key option.

Exactly where (elevations) this all takes place is probably a matter of some debate / scientific analysis.

Lucho - you got a take on this?

Week in review

M - 4 miles (37 min)
T - 0 miles
W - 13 miles (92 min)
Th - 7 miles (So Bo, Bear, 120 minutes), 5 miles (40 min)
Fr - 13 miles treadmill (87 min) with 6 x 3 minutes
Sa-  7 miles (54 min), 3 miles (10-15% grade - treadmill, 39 minutes)
Su - 17 miles (140 minutes)

Week - 70 miles, 609 minutes
January - 52 miles, 480 minutes

Decent week.  It began to come unraveled from a training perspective with the skiing on the front end, and then towards the end with the pups being born and my stomach aching ...  I got in a good run on Wed, good climbing on Th (but slow), some repeats on Friday ... and a good slow long run on Sunday.   I'd love it all to be faster - but who wouldn't?!  I definitely want to start getting more of a decent long run in more often  ... I tend to eschew that too much.  I am considering having one or two of days in my training that are REALLY light (not goose eggs but like 4-6 miles) so I can really tag it the next day.