Your heart rate alarm beeps 5 minutes into an easy run. You walk. It drops. You run. It beeps again.
Hey runners, how’s it going?
I hear about this run every week.
You discovered that low-heart-rate training is the right way to go for us older runners, so you calculate your Maffetone training heart rate. Then you head out for an easy 30 minutes with your Garmin set to that training heart rate. Five minutes in, the alarm goes off. You ease up. It goes off again. You walk until your heart rate drops 10 beats, start jogging, and 3 minutes later you’re walking again.
You cover the distance, but half of it was walking. You come home feeling you flunked an easy run.
Here’s what’s going on. Most of you run your normal runs at too fast a pace, and that pace makes it hard to get your training heart rate down. Walk breaks become the only way to stay in your zone.
One runner summed it up for me: “If I got better at running slow, I could lower my heart rate without having to take walk breaks.”
That’s exactly right. Running slow is a skill. You can practice it and get better at it, and the first step is finding your minimum viable pace. I call it your MVP.
What your MVP is
Your MVP is the slowest pace you can keep running, without stopping, for 30 minutes.
It’s still running. Your feet leave the ground, your arms swing, and you keep a running stride. It’s just very, very slow.
I came up with this method because I struggled when I first started training with the Maffetone formula. Dr. Phil Maffetone’s low heart rate method rebuilt my running after my second heart attack at 62, but the starting heart rate it gave me was too low to run at. My MAF number was 128bpm (180 minus 62, plus 10).
I’ve coached over 100 older runners in the last 10 years, and most of them struggled with their calculated MAF heart rate too. For runners over 60, the 180-minus-age formula (MAF) gives you a training heart rate so low you end up taking walk break after walk break just to stay under it.
I got so frustrated stopping and starting, waiting for my heart rate to settle, that I had to find another way. My problem was simple: I didn’t know how to run slow efficiently.
I put my focus on pace. I practiced running very slow and very steady. (I also worked on my running form, and I’ll cover that in the next article.) My first slow runs averaged 138 bpm. Over several weeks, holding that same pace, I watched my average drop 10 beats to 128, right at my MAF number.
It worked so well I gave it a name: Reverse MAF. Standard Maffetone training holds your heart rate steady and lets your pace improve. Reverse MAF holds your pace steady and lets your heart rate come down. I’ve used it to help my runners reach their aerobic training heart rate without walk breaks.
Your MVP is the pace you hold steady. One 4-step test on your next run gives you the pace that gets you through 30 minutes without a single walk break.
