I knew someone would ask. I don't know why this whole matter of the 30-minute test is so difficult for folks to understand. So here's the latest question, the one which I mentioned in a previous post I was going to not bring up because it just further confuses everyone…
QUESTION: One question for you–My coach in San Francisco has always said that we should do the LTHR tests at a pace we could hold for an hour. E.g. While the running time trial is 30 minutes, he has told us that the literature suggests that you want to choose a pace that you could hold for up to an hour is you absolutely had to. I did some reading online and there appear to be two schools of thought. The first is what you described in your book and on the blog when you said do the 30 minute time trial at an all out effort and the second which is to do it at a pace you could hold for an hour. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this point.
ANSWER: When you do a one-hour race you go very hard because you are highly motivated due to the race environment–it's a competition and you're psyched. When you do a solo workout of one hour you don’t push yourself quite as hard. It's not a competition. You're not psyched. That's just a normal reaction. You may think you are working just as hard but you most likely are not. So a one-hour solo workout is very unlikely to produce the same pace or power as a one-hour race even if they feel equally hard. In fact, to find the equivalent “race” power/pace for one hour you can do a _solo_ workout of about 30 minutes and the numbers will be roughly the same I've found. In other words, in a solo workout the pace or power for 30 minutes is about equal to the pace or power in a race of 60 minutes.
