Why the Same Pace Feels Easy 1 Day and Death the Next

[00:00:00] You’re out on your usual route. It’s the same loop, same pace, and the same effort. You’re crushing it. You got a low heart rate, smooth stride, and you’re feeling like a runner in some sort of a shoe ad commercial. Three days later. Same you the same route and the same pace. But this time you feel like you age 10 years and gained 10 pounds overnight.

[00:00:22] What changed? Your fuel system. In this episode, I’m breaking down the three fuel systems your body uses when you run, and which one you’re over. Tapping. Why running harder won’t make you run faster or farther and what actually will, how these systems blend at different paces and what that means for your training.

[00:00:39] Most runners think they just need to run more or run harder. False. Your body has three different fuel tanks and if you don’t understand which one’s power, which pace. You’ll keep burning out, plateauing or feeling like death on every run. I am Daren D Lake certified run coach and lifelong runner of almost 30 years.

[00:00:57] Yes, since the nineties. Once I stopped hammering tempo runs every week and actually spent 80% of my time building my aerobic base, I ran sub three hours in the marathon and sub 17 in the 5K. And I wanna show you and a hundred thousand other self-coach runners how to do the same. Let’s get into the episode.

[00:01:14] Alright, so most runners, they live in the wrong fuel tank. They think I wanna run a faster 5K, so I should run at 5K pace more often or even faster. So they do tempo runs VO two max intervals threshold work every week, sometimes two to three days a week, 4, 6, 2 8 weeks. And it works. They get faster, but then they plateau or they get injured or they burn out.

[00:01:36] Why do you think that is? Because they’re only training one fuel system. The sugar burner, the anaerobic glycolytic system, and anaerobic it means without oxygen, the one that creates lack. Tate and lactate or lactate acid, as some people say, makes your legs scream. They ignore the diesel engine, the aerobic system, which means oxygen.

[00:01:55] The one that powers 75% of your 5K race pace, 85% of your 10 K race pace, and 98 to 99% of your half and full marathon. Your body doesn’t have one. Fuel tanks, it has three, and they all work together. So system one is a TP. PC system, the nitrous booster system two is the anaerobic glycolytic system, the rocket fuel burner, and system three is the aerobic diesel engine.

[00:02:21] We got all car analogies today, and again, they’re mostly all on and working at the same time. It’s just in different ratios, depending on how hard you’re going, how fast you’re going, how fit you are. Temperature, humidity, how tired you are, et cetera, et cetera. But let’s start with system number one. The A TP PC System, AKA, the Nitrous booster for all you Fast and Furious fans out there and car geeks.

[00:02:43] Here’s what the A TP PC energy system actually is. Your muscles have a small stash of instant energy called a TP. Think of it like the battery and your phone. It powers everything you do. But check this though, you only have about five, maybe 10 seconds worth of this instant fuel stored up in your body at any given time.

[00:03:00] So when you do a quick burst. Like a few strides of a run or hammer it up a really steep hill, your body taps into something called phospho, creatine, or PC for short, which quickly recharges the A TP battery. No oxygen needed, no burning sensation in your legs, just. Pure explosive power for about five to 10 seconds.

[00:03:21] I’m talking about 100%. This is bodybuilders lifting one rep maxes, CrossFit people, et cetera. Obviously sprinters, if you can train it, maybe you can do about 12 to 15 seconds, but then it’s all gone. And after you use it, you need three to five minutes of complete rest to fully reload those stores. That’s why strides imply a metrics and even some gym stuff and you know, lifting heavy have such long rest periods, you’re not being lazy, you’re giving your body time to recharge the system.

[00:03:47] So the next rep. Is just as powerful and you get the most gains out of it. You don’t wanna come into it tired. So here’s a quick cheat sheet guide on when the A TP system fires the most, the first five seconds of any run, it actually just gets you going all out. Sprints and strides, which are anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds using mostly a TP.

[00:04:06] Up a steep hill. If you’re sprinting up that hill and you’re finishing kick in a race, so traps to avoid when you’re training the A TP PC system doing hill intervals or strides with only 30 seconds rest. So if you do. 20 seconds worth of efforts, whether it’s plyometrics, hills, strides, et cetera, and then you have a 32nd rest.

[00:04:26] Nah, wrong, you’re not training the A TP system because you’re gonna do another one, another one, another one. You’re just suffering in the anaerobic glycolytic system, and that’s the one that produces lactate and makes your legs scream, which we need to do sometimes. Here’s what to do this week so you can run better right now out in real life.

[00:04:44] Pick one. Easy run. 20, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, whatever. After you finish, do four strides on flat ground, preferably grass or AstroTurf, 15 seconds at most, maybe 12 seconds. If you’ve never done this before, at 90 to 95% effort, then walk back to your starting point. This long rest gives you time to replenish and reload your A TP.

[00:05:06] PC system and you wanna focus on the strides with smooth acceleration, not 100% speed, just 90, 95%, you’ll know what that is. You’re training the system to fire efficiently and run with better economy. You’re not testing how fished you can go because you could get injured. Do this start at one time per week.

[00:05:23] The second week, maybe add at five strides and then. Twice a week on the third week, et cetera. That’s it. You’re building neuromuscular power without the injury risk. Uh, I did a whole episode on that, on strides and how to do them properly. I do much better deep dive and show you in real time. You’re out in the field with me doing strides.

[00:05:40] Get it at the link above or below in the description or show notes if you’re listening on the podcast player. But speaking of systems, if you want to actually build your aerobic engine and run farther with less effort, I made a free training system, better known as a training plan just for you. It’s called the run farther for longer with less effort, base building plan, a lot of words, but basically this is how you build up that aerobic.

[00:06:03] Diesel engine system, which I’ll talk about at system number three very shortly. You’ll also auto magically sign up for a free email course that teaches you how to self-coach yourself around injuries and avoid them in the first place. So much free stuff in here. The QR codes right here. Go get that, scan it, or the link is below in the show notes or episode description.

[00:06:23] And you know what? While you’re there, just comment and tell me which energy system confused you the most before you started watching this. ’cause you know, I’ve got certifications. I did a bunch of study, even been talking to people, researching, and before I did all this, I was really confused with, with a lot of this stuff, a TP in particular.

[00:06:38] So, uh, let me know what you think. Back to energy system number one a TP. It’s always being used, but it needs help from other energy systems when you start going longer. Enter system number two, the anaerobic or glycolytic system. This one’s like. Flooring your car’s accelerator with the AC cranked on full blast in the middle of, I don’t know, the summer, winter, whatever, just for no reason.

[00:07:00] You’re burning fuel fast and the engine is overheating that overheating. That’s lactate. What is it exactly? The whole glycolytic anaerobic system. It’s your body burning carbs, glycogen without oxygen. This is anaerobic without, and then aerobic. With oxygen, fast energy, but, and it takes a certain type of training so that your body can use the lactate as fuel rather than the burning sensation and the, uh, the thing that we don’t want.

[00:07:27] So lactate is actually a good thing if you train it right, which I’ll touch on in a second. So with the anaerobic glycolytic system, you are using the system most between 30 seconds and two minutes of a 95 to a hundred percent effort. And then lactate builds up so much. That you automatically slow down like you have to.

[00:07:44] So it fires most in between 400 and 800 meter repeats depending on how fast you go, uh, which is one to two laps around a track. Uh, the system fires at the end of vo two max intervals, hard surges in races, especially later on in the race. And then faster temporal runs where you’re deep into zone three.

[00:08:01] Heart rate, so trap to avoid if you wanna train the system properly. Living here, you don’t wanna sit here for very long. In and out runners think harder efforts equal better. So you do temple runs and intervals many times per week and it feels like, oh, I’m working, I’m doing this. But again, you plateau, you get injured, you burn out.

[00:08:18] Why? Because you never built your aerobic engine, which I’m gonna touch on. That’s system number three. You’re just spinning wheels, you’re burning carbs or sugar or glycogen, and wondering why you’re not. Proving I covered lactate threshold training in another episode. Actually many episodes did a whole series.

[00:08:34] You can get that series up above if you’re on YouTube or below in the show notes description if you’re listening or watching somewhere else. So yeah, you can actually train your body to use less glycogen during races, which is what we want. We wanna save it for the yen. But how do you do that? By building up the next system, which for distance runners is the most important system that we have.

[00:08:54] Enter system number three, aerobic the diesel engine. Think of highway cruising at 60 miles per hour, a hundred kilometers for your metric people. Smooth, efficient, sustainable. You could do this technically all day. If you had enough fuel, uh, you had enough food and the right types of food, you could literally run for all day.

[00:09:12] People do it. People run for many days out in the mountains in uh, somebody’s trail runs. Alright? What is the aerobic system? Your aerobic system burns fat. And carbs with oxygen. So this is, a lot of people think it’s just pure fat. No aerobic is using all of that and oxygen is dumping into your bloodstream, and that’s the energy lactate.

[00:09:30] Production stays low enough that your energy recycles it and uses it as energy, clean fuel, sustainable basically forever. As long as you got something again in your tank and you’re able to eat it, and obviously drink and hydrate and all that other stuff when it fires most. Everything longer than two minutes is when it’s mostly turned on.

[00:09:49] Remember the a hundred meter dash at nine seconds. For pros, they’re actually using about 10% aerobic still. So aerobic is still still on, but again, all distance running is when the aerobic system is firing most, and even a hard VO two max interval effort is mostly aerobic. People think when their heart rate is pinned in zone four and huffing and puffing that there.

[00:10:10] Anaerobic, but it actually is mostly aerobic. You slide down to like 50 to 60% aerobic, but it’s still aerobic and even a fast 5K where you feel like you’re dying can be 75 to 85% aerobic for most runners. So all that VO two max five K’s still aerobic. A 2001 study in sports medicine broke this down across race distances.

[00:10:29] Even events that feel anaerobic are still predominantly powered by your anaerobic system, especially anything longer than two to three minutes. So yeah, your 5K feels like pure suffering feels anaerobic, but feeling it and being it two different things. The burn is glycolytic flux. We’re getting in the weeds here, the power sustaining.

[00:10:49] You know, that’s aerobic. Here’s a trap to avoid when you want to build up this system. This feels too easy, so I’ll go harder, especially your new runners when you start out. I’m not breathing hard enough. I can’t be getting a work. Go. No untrue. Fake news. False. You’re building mitochondria when you’re working the aerobic system.

[00:11:04] Zone one, zone two, even a little bit of zone three is still building. The mitochondria are the little power plants in your cells that generate energy. The whole point of this episode, energy systems, you’re growing capillaries, so more blood and oxygen can reach your muscles. So think of ’em like little side roads that now can go to your muscles, so you can actually run at a lower heart rate.

[00:11:23] Easier and you’re teaching your body to burn fat efficiently instead of always going for the carbs and the sugar and the glycogen stores. And that stuff takes time to actually train your body to do that efficiently, and it happens much better. When you run easier, you get more efficient at the way that you’re running.

[00:11:41] I did a full episode on base building and why it matters, uh, up here. Get that link up there or below in a description, wherever you’re watching or listening. So why does this matter? Because most runners only train one system, the glycolytic, anaerobic, sugar carb burning system, and wonder why they, again, they plateau after four to six weeks.

[00:11:59] They’re like, why am I not getting better? And if you understand which system powers your pace, you can stop burning out and actually. Faster. If you want a step by step plan to build up that diesel engine, and also you can build up your anaerobic system. You can build a TP pc. I have a free run farther for longer or faster with less effort.

[00:12:18] Base building training plan. I have all the different types of workouts that work. All three systems and more. Plyometric, strength training, mental stuff, cross training. You’ll also get a free email course on how to self-coach yourself around injuries if you get them. And also to avoid them ’cause we just don’t want them in the first place.

[00:12:37] But they do happen. We wanna lower the risk for them. Get it at the QR code here, the link in the description below or in your show notes if you’re listening. Energy systems are great to understand, but running farther for longer with less effort. The diesel engine, as I’ve talked about throughout this whole episode.

[00:12:52] That’s the real level up for us. Distance runners. I broke down exactly how to build it in the video below on YouTube, or you can get that link for the base building video and episode in your show notes, podcast player or wherever else you’re watching or listening. All the best building up that diesel engine pace.