The Run Black Matter Training program thrives on helping athletes create awareness around how our bodies move and feel. We are making a push to redefine run culture and create a deeper sense of community with athletes near and far.

Over a 20 week period, the RunBMT coaches utilized the tools available in the Coros Training Hub to lead our competitive marathoners through a rigorous training cycle. We conducted a thorough analysis of the available metrics and decided how we could effectively use the data to enact change on our athletes’ performance. Here’s a look into our exceptional training block leading up to Space Coast Marathon.

Fatigue Plays An Important Role In Building Long-Term Fitness

We are a relatively low mileage program that places an emphasis on quality sessions and efficient movement patterns. Our program has a range of athletes from the weekend warrior with fitness goals to the entrepreneur and mom of 4 that aspires to compete in the Olympic Marathon Trials.

Our coaching staff utilizes the 7-day fatigue trend to guide our athletes in avoiding overtraining. We are able to monitor the data through the Training Hub and make informed decisions on increasing or reducing an athlete’s training load.

The most exciting feature of our athletes is the two-way communication that occurs after workouts.

This component allows us to combine the fatigue data with feedback from the athletes to make well-rounded decisions on the intensity of future training.

The optimal amount of fatigue ranges from (40-59). Our athletes fatigue trends between 45 and 55 with an average usually around 49 or 50. Several of our athletes reached 60 to 62 during their peak week of the marathon build, but quickly returned to the optimal range after several lower intensity runs.

How Are Our Athletes Building Through Their Phases?

Periodization is important to our program. Our coaching staff develops the skeleton that will take our athletes from base phase to goal race. This involves a specialized focus on varying level of intensity to make sure our athletes are primed for race-specific workouts to peak at the right time. Using the 4-week intensity distribution we are able to monitor an athlete’s intensity in each phase.

There are outside factors that we cannot control here in Florida, such as the weather. Heat can often take a prescribed zone 2 workout and push it into a higher intensity zone. With this tool, we are able to pivot future runs or workouts to maintain the desired balance of easy to hard efforts.

In a perfect world you would expect a progression of intensities across the micro-blocks, but in real-time you have to make constant adjustments to streamline progress. In the final 4 weeks of the build this athlete was dealing with hamstring issues. Reflected in the data is a lower percentage of “hard” effort, but increased “medium” efforts. This is managing intensity to maintain fitness, but prioritize health.

Are We Ready For Space Coast Marathon?

We love the marathon level metric. It helps us measure progress.

• J. Lamar – 82.5 to 86.6
• V.Polk – 78.2 to 82
• J. Kolasinski – 83.7 to 86