Kris Freeman

It was a foggy and damp day on Mt Sunapee yesterday for Kris’s first benchmark hillclimb effort of the training season, but conditions were good. No snow on the course, and just enough visibility to put one foot in front of the other.

There is nothing like an uphill running test to tell you where you stand. It’s a completely raw test of aerobic power. There’s no place to hide - any gains you make are gains that you’ve earned. We’ve been looking forward to this first test with a great deal of anticipation. Lab testing back in April looked good. Kris has felt good in training, and his workloads seem pretty high. But this test is the first real bottom-line comparison he’s had with last year’s fitness.

Last season Kris put up the following times:

• May 16 - 22:16
• July 15 -  21:35
• August 21 - 21:05
• October 3 - 20:50
• November 2 - 20:49 (last half with 3″ snow on the ground)

In keeping with the overall approach that Kris is taking to his intensity efforts this year, the plan was to start somewhat conservatively, and build the effort to an extremely hard finish. He did that (as you can see from this photo, taken just before the finish). The course has a short flat/downhill section about eight and a half or nine minutes in, and at that point Kris figures he was about 15 seconds behind his July effort from last year. At the finish, he was 21:50 - 15 seconds behind his July effort from last year. His lactate concentration at the finish was 12.4 mMol/L. We don’t have finishing lactates from these tests last year, but we know the range of peak values that he is capable of during different times of the year, and 12.4 is pretty high. Very close to his peak lactate on the treadmill in April.

So what do we know? He’s more fit than last May, and not quite as fit as last July. His peak lactate was similar to April, inspite of an overwhelming focus on aerobic conditioning in the past three weeks. However, he has done a couple of sustained threshold efforts, and it has been the goal to keep him in touch with the high-end fitness that he carried out of the season. One data-point doesn’t give us a huge amount to go on here, but there’s nothing to apologise for in this test. He’s fitter than at this time last year, and training is going well. Onward.