Favorite Workout: 10x1 minute L5 running with poles

by Jack Young, GRP Skier

According to Ben Franklin, the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, but for a GRP snow athlete, that list can be expanded to read: death, taxes and 10x1 minute L5 running with poles on Elinor’s hill. I am not a runner - have never claimed to be one - but as I have become a better cross country skier, my running has improved. For this reason, I wanted to write this post on a favorite running workout in the context of skiing. Sure, I have done running workouts for the sake of getting faster at running and quite enjoyed many of them, but for a running workout to be a favorite it needs to apply pretty directly to skiing. 

What you need 

A hill, a pair of poles, and a can-do attitude. Ideally, you would do this workout on a steep(ish) hill. You're looking for a hill that would be quite uncomfortable to encounter on an easy run. In a perfect world, the act of running up the hill would be somewhat hard. For poles, they should come up to about your armpits, and for the can-do attitude, that will be explained later. 

Why we do this workout:

The point of this workout is for your body to produce a lot of lactate. Running with poles (about the height of being able to rest under your armpits) is a very efficient way to recruit most of your muscle mass and is therefore an efficient way to completely flood your body with lactate. For a skier, doing this workout during the summer at a time when you are somewhat rested will keep you some level of “sharp” and prevent the large volume of training from suppressing your anaerobic systems excessively. Additionally, doing this workout and measuring blood lactate concentrations can help diagnose overtraining. If a skier whose max lactate is usually somewhere around 16 mmol/L can’t raise it above 10 mmol/L during this workout, it is quite likely that they are overdoing it. 

Moving beyond the summer months, we’ll do this workout, or a variation of it, a couple of times in preparation for the race season. We can and do complete this session occasionally on roller skis, but it's nearly impossible to create the same physiological response on roller skis as simply running up a hill with poles. A cross-country ski race is full of repeatedly flooding your body with lactate, resting, and repeating. This workout mimics this process to the extremes and has always been crucial to the final weeks of preparation for the first races of the year. 

Why you should do this workout

It’s no coincidence that the coaches of the Craftsbury masters program routinely prescribe this workout on the very same hill that the GRP does it on. Doing this workout both raises your heart to the extremes and improves your ability to do work while already at your limit. One other thing not mentioned earlier about this workout is that part of the point of doing it is precisely how hard it is. If done correctly, your fastest interval will happen somewhere between 5 and 8 and the rest of the workout will be just hanging on for dear life. The ability to continue to push as hard as possible knowing that you are slowing down is not natural, but this workout trains it. This is exactly why a can-do attitude is a prerequisite for this workout. If you go into this workout already dreading the pain, you may have already lost the battle. With that mindset, once it gets hard, it will be extremely hard to convince yourself to keep going. Being ready to embrace the pain and have fun doing it is required to get the most out of this one. 

The workout itself

One of the reasons that I am writing this blog on this workout is because it was on my training plan for this week. Yippee! Because of this, I think it could be useful to take y’all through my workout step by step. 

First off, you need to warm up well for this effort. Once you start the actual intervals, it needs to be fast and hard. This time, I did 25 minutes easy, 6 minutes of L3, then a hard but conservative effort up the hill I was planning on using for the workout. For a good description of L3, check out Luke Brown’s blog on uphill threshold on the treadmill. 

Getting into the workout itself, I ended up doing 7 repeats of a hill that took about 1 minute. The first 3 were relatively controlled and I pulled an 8.0 mmol/L of lactate after the third. It took me about 57-57-55 seconds respectively for these three. The next two were very very fast. It felt like I was sprinting the entire hill and hanging on for dear life at the top. These splits went 51 and 52 seconds. I pulled an 11.8 lactate after 5 repeats. After the 5th I made the decision that I could probably do one more fast one and one for the pure purpose of pushing through recognizing that I would not be able to go as fast. The 6th was again, very fast at 50 seconds which confirmed that I should do another. My 7th and last interval was slow at 54 seconds. I pulled a 17.8 which is a new PR and allows me to soundly beat any overtraining concerns. One of the most important parts of this workout is hitting a very hard fast effort and then continuing until you cannot go that fast anymore. I was happy to execute this in this session. 

Heart rate data isn’t always super useful for a workout like this. This is because your heart rate doesn’t always get that high during short intervals even if you are working as hard as possible. With this being said, you can still try to use the max heart rate of individual intervals compared against each other to help guide the workout. If you look at my graph, you can see that my max of the 6th interval, which was very fast, was significantly lower than the previous few intervals. Max heart rate getting lower during an interval set despite pace staying the same can be an indicator that you are about to blow up, and in this case it was. The point of including this is to note that although heart rate is not a great guide for moderating intensity for this workout, it can help you figure out when it may be time to call it quits. 

The beauty of this workout doesn’t lie in hitting perfect, even splits or nailing your goal pace for an upcoming competition. The beauty of this workout is in pushing yourself as hard as you possibly can without regard for the next interval then doing it again. I have both fond, and terrible memories of this workout on hot, humid summer days in Craftsbury and cold, rainy November days in Waterville where I went to college. Regardless of how much it hurts, I will always consider this workout a favorite, and I believe because of its simplicity and physiological impact, it could have applications in just about any endurance sport.