Marjaana Rakai (00:00)

what we collect in a Athletica is lot more relatable to most of the athletes than any laboratory test because the lab tests are usually just the one snapshot of what happens in a very controlled environment. Where do we race? Where do we work out? It's not controlled environment at all.

Paul Warloski (00:46)

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. What if you had a map to your training, not guesswork, not arbitrary intervals, an actual fingerprint of what your body can do. That's what a power and pace profile give you. It's a curve plotting your best efforts across different durations from short sprints to sustained endurance. Connect the dots and you can see exactly where your strengths and weaknesses lie.

No lab required, just data you might already be collecting on your bike computer or running watch. But why does this matter for everyday athletes? Because the profile tells you how long you can sustain different intensities. It reveals your critical power or pace, that boundary between sustainable effort and unsustainable suffering.

Once you know that number, you can set your training zones that actually make sense for your physiology, not generic percentages that might be too easy or too hard. And what we'll focus on today, you can estimate your pacing and finish times using this profile. In this episode, we'll start with what the profiles are, how to build one, and finally, how to use them for race pacing. So.

Paul and Marjaana what exactly is a power or pace profile and why should everyday athletes care about it?

Paul Laursen (02:11)

Sure, why don't I start in, Paul? This is kind of fundamental, sports science 1.0 type stuff. This was actually one of the first papers that ever came out in the world of sports science was by Professor A.V. Hill in 1925. And he went and plotted all of the world record times for swimming and running. So you basically looked at the time and he looked at the distance.

Right? And he looked at, the length of the swimming or running ⁓ duration went out, expanded, the power or pace that was sustainable went lower and lower and lower and lower. Right? So this is like a fundamental principle that is within all animals ⁓ and all humans, of course. So you have that yourself in Athletica.

on your power and pace profile. That is your signature of what you can sustain historically over everything from five seconds sprinting to five hours of cycling or whatever duration that you go out to. And we all recognize that signature, that fingerprint, but that is ultimately the insight and the window, Paul, to ⁓

the pacing profile and what you can sustain theoretically for any given race that's upcoming. You can use that as a good way of guesstimating what your race time and performance is going to be.

Paul Warloski (03:51)

How is the profile different than traditional lab testing like a lactate threshold test?

Paul Laursen (03:58)

Yeah, well, they're actually fully related, and they tend to correspond. In the physiological lactate test or VO2 max test, we're looking more at physiological parameters that are actually corresponding with those power or pace markers, right? So let's just think of like a progressive step test that you might do if you wanted to go, you know, determine your VO2 max.

Well, let's say you're doing that for the bike, your power that's being prescribed and pushed to you while you ride your bike goes higher and higher and higher in a linear step increase. And then you measure some variable, usually a number of different variables. often that is the oxygen that's being uptake and processed in your body. Of course, when that gets to the very top of the powers that you can sustain, that we determine is your VO2 max or your VO2.

peak. And we also see the heart rate that's corresponding with that top marker. Well, all that's fine and good. What we've discovered is that we can actually do predictions for just using our own power numbers in something that's called the maximal mean power. So VO2 max, for example, is attained through something basically the maximal power that you can sustain or maximal pace you can sustain.

for say five minutes, that's the power that's really associated with your VO2 max. A lot of laboratory studies have just confirmed that that five minute marker tends to be quite corresponding with that. Likewise, many of us have heard of the ⁓ famous FTP test, functional threshold power test. Well, that is 20 minutes all out. And that's very similar to your critical power.

So we're always measuring that invisibly in Athletica, and as a result, we can get these sorts of landmarks. And if you pull up your power or pace profile, you will see your VO2 max power, your threshold power, that's the critical power, or your aerobic threshold power, that's the first ventilatory threshold, gas exchange threshold, and then also the sprint power as well. So we see those four physiological landmarks that are predicted

⁓ within the PowerPace profile. Not as perfect as laboratory markers, sure, but a heck of a lot more affordable and quite related.

Marjaana Rakai (06:27)

going to throw in a little kicker there. think that what we collect in a Athletica is lot more relatable to most of the athletes than any laboratory test because the lab tests are usually just the one snapshot of what happens in a very controlled environment. Where do we race? Where do we work out? It's not controlled environment at all.

So when you have a range of these measurements over time, right, like you're looking at months, even, sometimes year across different environments, different temperatures, it's a much more true profile than than the snapshot from one laboratory five months ago.

Paul Laursen (07:18)

I could not agree more. This is the what you are capturing using your wearable devices. Whether those, that's the, the Wahoo Kickr power meter that you might have on your ⁓ ergometer, whether it's the power meter on your bike, the GPS that you have. Think of the frequency of sampling that you're getting on all of these, right? You're constantly getting these functional measures of how you can perform.

Marjaana Rakai (07:28)

Thank

Paul Laursen (07:44)

and then the physiology that's corresponding. I would argue, I have this argument a lot with pure physiologists where these are the markers that actually matter because this is you in the world, this is you in the real world constantly going out there performing. And I think this invisible monitoring is actually way more powerful than something you might go to pay $300 or more in a laboratory

Paul Warloski (08:05)

Thank

Paul Laursen (08:14)

And, you know, well, there's lots of limitations there when you go as well, right? Did they calibrate the cart correctly? Did the person that was assessing me know what they were doing? And how does all of that relate to what I actually do when I'm on my bike or run or in the pool? So, yeah, I think there's great strengths to what we've developed here.

Paul Warloski (08:37)

So should athletes use their best training or racing data or is it better to do a power profile or a pace profile test?

Or both.

Paul Laursen (08:49)

Yeah, think both are very good and valid markers of where you're at in any given time, right? Like the race itself is the race of truth ultimately, right? Like everything's on the line. That is actually what you can do. It's a, RPE should be 10, right, to the top, 10 out of 10. And that should, you know, that really is a great marker. And you really want to capture that in your device file if you can.

because you should see everything right to the top and the peak for whatever duration you went all out in. yeah, that is the truth. And then tests are also the other great one too. These are other places where you're getting close to all out natures. mean, that is fundamentally, when we do ⁓ true power profiling or pace profiling, you want an all out measure.

across any given time window of when I say maximal mean power or maximal mean pace, this is a window across any of those given durations, right? So that's, and you want to go ideally all out in that segment. So both are very valid and when you get both, then they are accumulating over time.

And again, going into Athletica and becoming part of your profile signature.

Paul Warloski (10:19)

Can the profile tell us what kind of workouts an athlete should be doing? Can it tell us their strengths and weaknesses? Talk about that. How does that work?

Paul Laursen (10:30)

Yeah, again, it can give insight. you're, I mean, you're really reaching into the Professor Peter Wayend and Matt Bundles anaerobic speed and power reserve concept. And this is really just to explain what that is. There's a free, go to athleteprofilingprimer.com, you get a free, 100 % free five day course on this whole concept. And ultimately what this, what this, what they discovered was that

the differences in fast and slow Twitch makeup of any human being can be probably picked out in their power and pace profile. In other words, Twitchy athletes, those with the predominance of fast Twitch explosive muscle fibers, they tended to have these higher peak power outputs over the short durations. And then they tended to fatigue a lot more, a lot quicker than the so-called diesel engines that would be sort of have that more sustainable

long tail approach of performance, right? So these two different profiles were there. So to answer your question, Paul, yes, this profiling can give insight into what type of phenotype we call it, are you? Are you a twitchy athlete? Are you a diesel athlete? Or are you a hybrid? Do you have kind of components of both? And we get something called the anaerobic speed and power reserve from that. Again, check out athleteprofilingprimer.com.

to learn more about that concept.

Marjaana Rakai (12:01)

given that you've actually done those short, hard efforts too as an endurance athlete. If you haven't done any sprints, then we don't have that data.

Paul Warloski (12:13)

Hmm.

Paul Laursen (12:13)

That's

right, absolutely. you gotta have the data. Gigo, right? Garbage in equals garbage out. So you gotta do ⁓ the work first.

Paul Warloski (12:25)

Does that argue for the test? Because the test is six seconds, 15, at least for the cycling test, six seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, one minute, four minutes, and 10 minutes. Is it the same for running? I'm not familiar with it.

Paul Laursen (12:38)

No, I think it's a little different for running. ⁓ I think it's more like 400 meters for running one kilometer and five kilometers, I believe that's. Is that right,

Marjaana Rakai (12:48)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And

that's why we do the test week or tests.

Paul Warloski (12:57)

Yeah, so we get the data points that we need to be able to plot out, you know, what our numbers are at different levels, different times.

Paul Laursen (13:05)

Yeah,

and importantly for the cyclists, Paul, you've mentioned the Mark Quad et al power profile. You described it well, the number of those segments and whatnot in terms of the all-out portions. But one thing that Andrea, our backend modeler, always reminds me that Athletica really, in order to get a valid power profile number, especially for the long tail,

So it scrapes out. You need an FTP test as well. So you almost need a separate day where you get a 20-minute all-out test too. ⁓ just like with the run test that MJ mentioned, you need three separate days with those all-out tests. Likewise with the cycling, you need at least two days to get a full signature of a valid power profile.

Paul Warloski (13:56)

Okay, okay, that makes sense. So how can the profile be used to prescribe an interval intensities?

Paul Laursen (14:06)

Right, well, the power profile, I mean, that's another really important aspect of all of this, right, is that this leads right back in a feedback loop to form your training zones, right? So we have a seven zone model in Athletica, and the key one that is anchored in just about all of them is your critical power or your critical pace. So we start there, and that anchors the... ⁓

Paul Warloski (14:12)

Mm.

Paul Laursen (14:33)

bottom of zone four and the top of zone three. So that's the marker right there in terms of the power and the pace. And then we take a fraction of that in terms of ⁓ where your aerobic threshold is and that comes down to the top of zone two, bottom of zone three. And then above that, we have various markers of the high intensity zones, zone five, zone six, zone seven, and these are determined by the

by the gap really that you have there in that sprint marker. So the twitchy athlete will have a really high peak power or ⁓ maximal sprinting speed. And so they'll have a wider ⁓ zone seven, right? The gap between that zone six and zone seven will be much wider. And yeah, and then I believe the, yeah, the zone five is then anchored in the five minute mark.

Right, remember the VO2 max marker. ⁓ that's kind how those zones are spread out based on the power profile, which is, know, other models are a little bit different where they just take arbitrary fractions across the whole gamut. Athletica takes more markers to determine where those anchors of those different seven zones are sitting.

Paul Warloski (15:59)

So is there something that an athlete can look at with the profile in terms of comparing profiles over time? Like should it be moving? Should it be changing? What is an endurance athlete looking for?

Paul Laursen (16:13)

So one of the things that they can look at, Paul, if I actually go to their profile and zones, is they can look down, so they'll see their profile there, and they can pick the exercise mode that they wanna look at. They can look at the different best efforts that are made. They can look at the training zones that I just went over, the seven zones, or five zones for the heart rate. And then they, at the very bottom is what's called threshold history.

and they can actually look how threshold has evolved over time. In a perfect world, we see threshold trending up with more training towards our priority event. And then it may come down in the off season. But ultimately, that's where you can discover at least the anchor threshold, critical power, critical pace changing. And that's the only one that we have at this point.

However, I will also say that the AI coach, the latest version, ⁓ is equipped with a long-term, a very good long-term head on its shoulders. And it does not forget anymore. And it will look back in your history of your data to look where those zones were. So if you have any questions in terms of how that's evolved, just type in and ask your AI coach.

your AI coach will do the work and go through your database and give you that history of how all the zones have changed over time in the past.

Pretty cool.

Paul Warloski (17:52)

Very cool. So we've gone over what the profile is, some ways of using it, and some ways of comparing what we've done in the past to our new profile and what goes into each of the data points. Let's kind of get into our main idea today about how Power Profiles and Paste Profiles can help predict race performance. How can we use them

for event specific training planning. I've had several questions from athletes about this and for long distance running races, for example, trail runs. How can we make this work?

Paul Laursen (18:32)

Well, where I usually start, is with AI coach often. I will usually drum up a nice little conversation first and foremost with the AI coach. It's becoming better and better every day at making these assessments ⁓ because, you know, it's intelligent in terms of looking at, recent history, also last year's history as well. You just have to prompt it accordingly. ⁓

But that is really where I would start with any of these is to start using up your tokens and start to get insight into your, well, first of all, you're probably interested in, you're going through your training, you're kind of starting to wonder if you're like me, you're like, I wonder what I could do, right? I'm sure your mind wanders ⁓ sometimes when you're out there on the bike or in the run or in the pool about.

But I wonder what's possible on race day. Do you think I could be up there with Blumenfeld on the day? Maybe I could.

Paul Warloski (19:33)

You

Paul Laursen (19:35)

And ⁓ so, yeah, it's like, all right. But then, you know, let's see what reality is, right, when the rubber hits the road. And the AI coach will be an objective coach at that point and really tell you where reality is actually landing with in terms of what is sustainable. And another really good way, and make sure, you know, you might have to help prompt the coach to get there, but really look at what those key sets were. ⁓

how you're performing in those key sets. You'll look through Athletica, a lot of times, whether it's swim bike run specific, not just triathlon, but just any of the events, there are weekend rehearsal training sets that are preparing you for that race. Key sets, right? Often mid-zone markers that are in alignment with whatever you might be doing, whether it's a gravel race, a road race.

you know, half marathon, marathon, triathlon, et cetera, right? Like there's these pieces, these set pieces that are in there on the weekends where it's time to prepare and do pieces of that intensity that you're going to be at. And it's really good there to actually look at, you know, am I dialing in that pace? How is my heart rate tracking in those paces? And ⁓ the AI coach is now so equipped that it can actually go through and look at those specific segments. So I did this for an athlete the other day.

one of the athletes that I coach is she's currently doing like, ⁓ she's doing 1.5K ⁓ sub-thresholds, classic Norwegian model, and she's doing like four by one, 1.5K on a treadmill, so very controlled. And I asked the AI coach, I said, know, is there any evidence from the last two weekends on her progression in those sub-thresholds, know, top of the zone 3B ⁓ run pieces that I'm prescribing?

from week on week. An AI coach took its little sweet time and went in there, but it did it and it pulled out each one of those pieces and basically told me that, you know, she's looking really good and those 1.5 kilometer repeated pieces, the heart rate ⁓ on week, you know, the second week that she's been doing those double threshold runs is getting lower and lower in those, which is exactly what you want, right? The more

Paul Warloski (21:38)

Thank

Paul Laursen (22:00)

The more that heart rate is lower at the same absolute running pace, well heck, that means that her efficiency factor is higher, her aerobic decoupling is lower, and she's, you know, we did a whole episode, on aerobic efficiency, and that's what it's all about. And that's, know, these are the pieces that are gonna feed back, so there should be no surprises actually on race day in terms of what you're actually going to do. ⁓

Paul Warloski (22:18)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Laursen (22:29)

So that's, you know, I've long winded, you know, talk about the power of our AI coach now that's in, you know, it's version 2.0. And that's really where I would be starting with some of these conversations because everyone listening has their own context, their own event that they're training for. But irrespective of that, you have a prescription that should always be preparing you for the event that you're about to do.

Paul Warloski (22:33)

That's a good example.

Paul Laursen (22:57)

So look to the specific key sets and look for those efficiency numbers and find out the answer and then getting your head around what the target is going to be for that race day. So I'll stop there, hand over to MJ if I'm sure she's got some thoughts on this herself.

Marjaana Rakai (23:13)

Yeah, I was going to say just race specificity. when you're plotting your race day, have a look at that race profile and try to, and like sometimes you need to make a really conscious effort to pick as much as you can. ⁓ Pick a training profile. mean, if it's a flat race, ⁓

Great. If it's a hilly race and you don't have hills, then you're going to be stuck on a treadmill. ⁓

imitate that. So make sure that you understand that every training decision that you make without AI coach or not, or human coach, that you want to along your training ⁓ plan, however long it is, like you want to be able to prepare yourself for those ⁓ race sections or race day. So

If you're looking at the pace profile, let's talk about running. If you're looking at a pace profile and you're aiming for a marathon ⁓ and you're asking yourself, hey, what can I do on a race day? Make sure that you've actually ran some of like a similar race profile.

before you draw conclusions to what you can do on a race day based on your training. Because if you're training for a hilly marathon and you only run on flat, then you're gonna probably crash and burn going too fast. Does that make sense?

Paul Warloski (24:36)

Hmm.

it makes sense. how does it actually work? mean, how do you actually plan out if you've got a hilly course that you're running on a marathon? How do you look at your power profile and your pace profile to figure that out just based on the time that it's going to take to go up the hill? I mean, how does it how do we do that?

Paul Laursen (24:56)

you have to,

Marjaana Rakai (25:17)

Yeah, right. like if, if your longest training run has been, let's say just throw out numbers three hours and you run it on five 30, but you run it on a flat, you can't expect running a Healy marathon on five 30 pace. Right.

Paul Warloski (25:31)

Hmm, I see.

Paul Laursen (25:37)

Yeah, and I'll add two caveats to or two additions to that that you should consider. One is using the normalized graded paste and NGP. You'll actually see that when you go in to do your analysis. And this is, I believe it's a Garmin metric. So it might be exclusive to Garmin users, but ultimately it weights the hill. And it's much like normalized power, Paul, you'll know in your...

Paul Warloski (25:38)

Got it.

Paul Laursen (26:06)

and your training peak's kind of vernacular, and where your weighting intensity will hear their weighting gradient to look at what what is a hilly kind of ⁓ version of that pace actually correspond back to. That's NGP. But also, I'll have to give credit to the power meter makers of the running, ⁓ in the running mode.

⁓ things like Stride and others, where this is again in the context of the Mountain Runner, this is also another potentially useful tool to leverage and to run to power at that point. And I know that's used by lots of ultra runners, ⁓ because they can actually lock in in real time on their watch to, you know, just like we can do on PowerPol, and we can just, you know, pace it.

that way, just like in the cycle context.

Paul Warloski (27:08)

Alright, so we can definitely use a power profile first by asking AI coach and if you know if we don't have a AI coach, we're using some other platform looking at the individual data points for as Marjaana was talking about, know, finding the distance that we're expected to run and figure out from there what kind of pace we should be running at. Is that what I'm hearing?

Paul Laursen (27:33)

Yep.

absolutely. Like you're, well, that's, that's at least like, you know, a target, a ballpark. And of course you may be able to lift higher on, on a given day. You know, we see this often on many athletic examples where yes, you've, you you've got a certain amount of, ⁓ because, know, a lot of times we really increase the frequency of training in athletic and we don't always do the long run. ⁓ so on the day.

Paul Warloski (27:40)

targets.

Correct. Yeah.

Paul Laursen (28:02)

what winds up happening is workout reserve, which is always looking back at your historic data. Well, you know, after it reaches just past halfway often, the workout reserve goes negative. you're on to, you're in kind of technically new territories and you're gonna be reaching a personal best for say a marathon. Classic example, and I know you won't mind me mentioning our chairman, Athletica Mark Bridges just did the Toronto Marathon last weekend.

And he did exceptional. I loved chatting to him about this. he was actually ⁓ questioning a little bit of the Athletica logic himself. But now he's like a full believer because his longest run actually only got up to 22 kilometers is what he said. ⁓ In his context, that was the most actually that he could do because he had a bit of a back issue. But the frequency of training was just perfect throughout.

So 22 kilometers, but then on the day, of course, you're to run 42 kilometers. It's like, you know, can I hold that sustainable, you know, threshold pace? And he did. And, he set a personal best going under four hours for him, which was, know, exceptional. but again, you look at his power or his profile for that, you can see workout reserve is basically going negative after about 25K.

He's just nothing's longer than that at that sustainable pace. So you gotta, on race day, you kinda gotta go all in and hope to heck that you you sustain. But again, in theory you should because the reason for, the reason why, just to be clear, people are asking, well why isn't athleticia prescribing 35K or more for a marathon? The reason, because we know what wins, we know that

pure volume of your week is going to trump any one single long run. Imagine you're doing one single long run for 35k. Well, can you run very well in the next five days after that? I know I can't. I don't have the resiliency. But if you're doing bits and pieces and you're increasing your overall training volume, well, now you actually can. So this is where there's an incongruency, Paul, between the profile that we just talked about.

and the reality of what is actually possible. So there's a balancing act, there's an art that's behind the science.

Paul Warloski (30:37)

What are some of the most common mistakes athletes make when building their power profiles or in using their profiles?

Marjaana Rakai (30:45)

Not looking at them at all?

Paul Warloski (30:47)

Hahaha!

Yeah, I imagine too, MJ, what you were talking about earlier is that athletes can very easily overestimate or underestimate what their race pace is going to look like depending on the profile, the elevation profile of their race.

Marjaana Rakai (31:04)

Yeah, well, I spoke with Mark too after his marathon and he said that his stretch goal, he reads his stretch goal, which I guess like it's the intuition that he believed he could do, but he would be like super stoked if he could. ⁓ I think he went under 13 seconds or something like that. ⁓ So that was really.

Paul Laursen (31:27)

Yeah, I think he did like

a 354 high.

Marjaana Rakai (31:31)

Yeah, so which was cool because I didn't know that he only did 22k run before. So going into race day, 22k under his belt, it must have been a little bit nerve-racking. You know, like 22 is not typically what people prescribe for marathon training.

Paul Warloski (31:33)

Nice.

Mm.

Marjaana Rakai (31:57)

So just like knowing what you can like in like your his intuition knowing that he could probably do under four hours and stretch goal 355 was pretty cool. ⁓ You know that he had that wisdom in him.

Paul Laursen (32:15)

Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I think the other thing, Paul, a bit of a mistake that people make, and everyone has their reason, but it's sometimes it's not taking the time to really capture the maximal mean power or the maximal mean pace that's missing within the profile. And like we said, garbage in, garbage out. You know, if the AI coach hasn't...

doesn't have ⁓ a real true marker of where that maximal mean power or pace sits. And what I'm talking about is these different windows of five minutes, of two minutes, of three minutes, of 20 minutes. If that's missing, then it's not gonna be a valid profile. And then your zones can be off potentially and other things. So you can tweak those. can just, you know,

go with adjusting your profile accordingly. But I think if you have the physical ability, if you don't have an injury, if there's no niggles and you have lots of time to go, then it is worth doing a test week to actually find out where your profile sort of lies.

And then once you have that data, then you can move forward in the next training block to see if we can move the needle on those. Because there will be, I guarantee you, a one-to-one relationship between how that profile moves, hopefully going up, it likely goes up, and your race time, your performance, which is usually why we're coming to Athletica.

look forward to any further questions on this from anyone listening and make sure you've, yeah, you're checking out, it's under your profile and zones in terms of your, in your insights category on the, on the left-hand tab of your Athletica dashboard. So check it out there, check out, see where yours is sitting.

have a look at yours in recent time, the last three months, and the various different subsequent years, does it look like it's a valid profile? Do I need to go in there and do some retesting so that I do have that valid profile? And then everything else will roll out well subsequently.

Paul Warloski (34:44)

Thanks for listening today to the Athletes Compass podcast. Take a moment now, subscribe, share, and let's keep navigating this endurance adventure together. Improve your training with the science-based training platform, Athletica, and join the conversation at the Athletica Forum. From Marjaana Rakai and Dr. Paul Larson, I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass podcast. Thank you so much for listening.