Hi!
I performed a lactate ramp test on a treadmill today, Saturday 3/8/25, using a lactate meter. Upon uploading the session to the training plan it gave me a new updated threshold and found that the automatically detected critical HR was 178 bpm with a critical pace of 6:29 min/mi.
Some background:
I’m 38 years old, I did a 5k PR a couple months ago averaging a 6:17 min/mi pace (19:30) and was holding a HR of 174 bpm during that time.
During this lactate ramp test, I crossed AeT (>2 mmol/L lactate) at 146 bpm at 9:05 min/mi pace, then crossed LT2 (>4 mmol/L) at 167 bpm at 7:03 min/mi pace.
The paces / data captured by garmin were wildly inaccurate to what was dialed into the treadmill. I trust the paces on the treadmill, which were at times a full 1 min/mi slower that the garmin detected. I did the “calibrate and save” function to add approximately 1.5 miles onto the total distance of the run and it didn’t change anything to the data.
Also, today I was originally scheduled to do a 55 min L2 aerobic development run with an anticipated load of 67. Strangely, the actual load of this workout (which was the same amount of time but spent significantly about L2) was only 58.
Summary of my questions:
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I haven’t heard of critical pace and critical HR in running before, but those are used in the overview. When you hover over those terms, it says “threshold pace” and “threshold HR” which if it’s referring to LT2, these numbers are quite a bit off. Do these automatically-detected values of 178 bpm and 6:29 min/mi seem accurate to you based on this information?
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How did the actual training load become so much lower than the originally scheduled L2 aerobic development run, despite being a much more taxing workout over the same time period?
Thank you,
Evan