You're training too hard, too often.
It's a bold statement. But after 18 years of coaching and thousands of lactate tests, I'm confident saying it to most amateur athletes I meet.
And here's the thing. Most of them don't believe me at first.
"But I'm going slow," they say.
Maybe, but slow and easy are not the same thing.
You can be going slow and still working hard because you're unfit.
On the flip side, someone like Eliud Kipchoge could be running 3:30 /km and running quite easily. Easy for him, but fast.
Speed is relative. Effort is what matters.
Most amateur athletes have never learned to tell the difference. So they call their easy runs easy, pile hard work on top of hard work, and wonder why they're not improving.
They train at the same moderately hard intensity day after day. Not hard enough to drive real adaptation. Not easy enough to actually recover.
This is how you end up in the grey zone.
The grey zone is a place where nothing is quite working. Your easy training isn't easy enough to let you recover. So when your hard training comes around, you're already carrying fatigue.
The hard work suffers.
Keep going long enough, and the body finds a way to make you stop. You get sick. You get hurt. Or you just stop wanting to train.
None of this is sustainable. And none of it makes you faster.
This is why I use lactate testing whenever possible. To set real thresholds. To show them what easy and hard actually look like for their body.
Not a guess. Not a pace chart. And not an algorithm. Their numbers.
