Silent Sports Column

The goal of training is to get faster. Unless you have a fancy GPS watch and the time to track every one of your workouts, it’s hard to truly know whether or not your training is paying off.

While keeping a detailed journal of data from every workout may be unrealistic, keeping track of progress is one of the most important parts of a sound training plan. And although heading into the lab and wearing an oxygen mask and electrode wires while hooked up to a computer that tracks every beat of your heart may be the most exact, it is not the most practical. Often times, all it takes is a stopwatch and patience.

In general, fitness testing is done by completing the same distance every few weeks to see if you are getting faster. If a five-mile stretch of road takes you 15 minutes to bike one week and 14 minutes to bike the next week, then you have improved.

Of course, there are countless variables to fitness testing that must be taken into account. Therefore, the most important part of fitness testing is trying to limit those variables as much as you can. You can do this by having a designated stretch of road that you perform every one of your tests on. You can also try to isolate for the weather and other environmental conditions. A hot humid day in August will probably give very different results than a windy day in November after the first snowfall.

In running, one of the best ways to isolate for variables is by using a treadmill. A treadmill offers the same conditions every day of the year.

After you have isolated for as many variables as you can, you must choose the one fitness marker that will serve as your checkpoint. For most, this will be pace. If you cover the same distance in a faster time, you are more fit. The problem with pace is that it is directly related to effort, which is a tough thing to keep consistent without any data. Perceived effort is subjective, which is the bane to sound experimentation.

Heart rate monitors serve fitness testing well because, although they are highly sensitive to environment, your heart is an objective measure of effort. Heart rate increases with effort so, theoretically, if you can decrease your heart rate while keeping your pace the same, you are improving. Your heart has to do less work to produce the same speed.

Fitness testing can be done with any kind of endurance sport as long as the conditions are consistent. As the body adapts to training, a training plan must also adapt to continue stressing the body to improve. These tests ensure you are always improving and never standing still.

Got questions on your training, racing or nutrition? Send them to [email protected] and I’ll answer them in next week’s column.