I’ve been around the running world long enough to have heard the term “no-man’s-land.” I’ve also been around long enough to have spent my fair share of time in no-man’s-land. No-man’s-land is generally classified as all paces that don’t fit into a specific zone. If the pace isn’t threshold, VO2Max, race pace, or easy pace, then it is no-man’s-land (from here on, I will call this NML), and running in there is considered pointless. When I was in college, NML was demonized to the point that I actually felt like a bad person if I veered into it during a run or workout. However, I’ve recently been introduced to a new concept that expands threshold and VO2Max paces past their traditional limits and encapsulates much of NML. So does NML even exist?
The new concept is intensive and extensive training zones. For example, intensive threshold means a pace faster than threshold, but the reps are short enough and the rest long enough that the athlete is able to clear lactate and stay around threshold for the whole workout. Extensive VO2Max is a pace slightly slower than VO2Max, but the reps are longer and the rest shorter, so the effort feels like VO2Max. “Intensive” and “extensive” an be added to any training zone, so a short easy run might be “intensive easy”, where the pace is faster than normal, but the run is short enough that the stress is still equivalent to an easy run.
This expansion of training zones intuitively makes sense: with a variation in the length of reps and rest, the paces that fit a zone should vary. Previously, I thought pushing shorter threshold reps was more for the ego, but it could be a method of improving lactate threshold. I’ve been using these extended training zones in workouts recently, and I love it. Watch the video below to see me run mile repeats at extensive threshold.
