translator wrote:
We call it "Fettstoffwechsellauf" (Fett -> fat, Stoffwechsel -> metabolism, Lauf -> run). The idea is, that you have a maximum of fat encyme activity in the blood at a certain effort (eg. 75% of HFmax). By having this activity for a longer time, it is thought, that this activity is somehow "trained", so you are using more fat at a quicker pace and therefore you can run longer with your glycogene. But as jtupper showed, you will also need more oxygene for it. So I have no idea, where the optimum is. And by the way: you do not only train the fat metabolism with the long run but also the glycogene storage and maybe other systems as well. So I am a little bit confused, to get this all into a right order.
Thanks translator. I have been experimenting with this approach in training. It requires a lot of concentration to run like this. At the start of a run that is slower than marathon pace; if Glycogen stores are high, fat metabolism is low. As the length of the run increases, fat metabolism increases too, to a very high level.
Another way to do this seems to be to run many hours after the last meal. I am sure that a huge amount of training can be done with mostly fat metabolism. How much will this affect fitness? surely a lot, and must be one of the reasons why Africans are naturally fitter, since they have less access to food, whereas we in rich nations have too much access to food.
In a marathon race however, it is always difficult to get the optimum amount of fat metabolism, because we start with very high glycogen storage, which mean that fat metabolism in the early part of the race is very low.
we may also find it difficult to start slower than race pace, whatever that might be, we can never be sure.
So do we start slowly and build up? or try to run even pace? It's very difficult to get it right.