Training faster may not make you race faster, experts say

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — This weekend, many will embark on their first ever Chevron Houston Marathon.

Others will try to finish with a personal best, but you’d be surprised to learn that running faster in training doesn’t necessarily make you faster on race day.

“The science to going faster isn’t going fast all the time,” insists Kimberly Gandler with the Iron Man Sports Medicine Institute. “Actually, it is spending more time in the zone two paces and building your aerobic engine. Over time, your lactate levels come down.”

In essence, it’s using your heart rate and appropriate paces to train.

“We want to get out of that zone two tempo paces, the grey zone. Those paces that a lot of us age-groupers want to spend a lot of time at. But, we are not going to see improvement, because both engines are simultaneously working and neither one is improving,” Gandler added.

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