Maffetone Revisited

Owwww! This is so hard!

I wrote recently about my experimentation with the Maffetone Method. My initial conclusion: It is a giant load of crap. I turned the heart rate alert off on my watch and started running faster paces again. Paces that used to be easy suddenly felt unsustainably hard as I reintroduced sub-9-minute speed into my legs.

I ran my frustration out for a few runs (like a long weekend), and then switched my display on my watch to show heart rate again. Just out of curiosity, not because I was going back to that stupid “run slow to race slower” concept. Just to see.

Almost immediately, I started seeing the kind of speedier pace trend that Maffetone promised: I was now able to run paces that used to blow my heart rate monitor up at a heart rate that was about 10 beats below my “MAF zone.” Since I didn’t feel like a slave to the chirping on my wrist, it wasn’t such a time and boredom suck to run bigger volumes. I went from 30 or 40 miles per week up to 50 or 60 (up to 15 miles per day), still keeping most of my running easy but allowing my heart rate to drift up in tougher conditions like heat, hills, or distances where heart rate creep was inevitable. Seriously, Mr. Maffetone; I refuse to run up a 4-mile hill at 154bpm. That's just crazy talk.

Three weeks later, I’ve gone from being able to run 5.7-6mph at my MAF heart rate up to 6.7 to 7mph again. What am I to make of this?

I should admit that a lot of variables changed in the past 3 weeks, not all to do with the average heart rate of my runs.

• 
  I started letting myself break 154bpm. Sometimes by only a few beats, sometimes exceeding it by 20 beats or more.
• I started running more volume, including two-a-days at least once a week.
• I drastically changed my diet, going back to eating clean: no sugars, no processed grains and no cheese. I also stopped eating starches during work hours.
• I have taken Optygen HP for years during periods of heavy training for years, and started taking it again when I kicked Phil Maffetone to the curb.
• I finally found a massage therapist who was able to help resolve a long-standing soleus injury that had been plaguing me for over 6 months.

Maffetone does have a place for pace work in his Method (everything above an easy aerobic pace - whether it be marathon race pace or 200m pace is called “anaerobic training”), but he is vague about how it should be implemented. Instead of describing how an athlete should use speed work to run faster, he only describes how an athlete can recognize he has done too much "anaerobic" work and should return to his MAF heart rate. So clearly there is something to be said for pace work, but it is unclear whether this contradicts Maffetone. Was I able to run faster at a lower heart rate because I did so much of my training at that lower heart rate and was therefore more efficient at burning fat, as Maffetone suggests? Or was I more efficient at the lower heart rates because my body was re-learning how to handle those higher heart rates again; getting better at clearing the byproducts of anaerobic metabolism? To put it another way: was it the speed that was making my slow running faster, or the slow that was making my faster speeds better?

What about the diet? Was I better able to burn fat because my blood sugar was more stable with a lower starch, very high fiber diet? (“Low carb” doesn’t really make sense for any unprocessed vegetarian diet.) This theory holds some water, given all the differences I noticed in my body when I cut out sugar and processed grains; but that’s a post for another time. But would it really affect my heart rate? Or just my recovery and glycogen sparing on longer runs?

Or was it just the volume? After all, it was when I started running monster volumes that I suddenly dropped 35 minutes off of my marathon time. Is it such a leap to think that 30-40 miles a week just wasn’t enough to maintain my fitness?

Or was it that I was no longer babying my left foot, and thus able to fully engage my glutes and hamstrings for the first time in months.

Or is it just the supplements?