The Physiology of Endurance Running Podcast · Dan Nash and Owain Zerilli

How to apply Training Zones to running

·1 hr 28 min·5 clips

Dan recommends aiming for the middle of the zone, not the line between threshold and severe.

The episode opens tired. Alain is tapering for Seville, and Dan is carrying parenting fatigue, an aquarium day, and too little sleep. The other side of the call is no fresher, because Dan has just come off another double threshold day and says it feels like he has been running all day. Once they settle in, the conversation turns to training zones and the problem of making a huge physiological range useful in practice. Their main target is the moderate intensity domain. They describe it as enormous for a well-trained runner, stretching from the bottom end of moderate work to about 75 percent of VO2 max. Alain adds that his LT1 tends to sit a little higher, closer to 80 percent of VO2 max, which he links to years of high-volume training. That leaves the same zone covering anything from walking up to running around 3:20 per kilometre pace. Dan points out that those efforts do not cost the same in fatigue. The fact that there is no sharp break inside the domain does not make the zone pointless. It just means the range has to be broken into smaller pieces. They talk through the idea that training zones are there to help you read what a session is actually doing. The logic is practical rather than neat. If a run sits in the same domain but behaves differently, the athlete still needs a way to tell the difference. Alain and Dan keep coming back to utilization, which is really the point of the discussion. How much of the work sits in each part of the range matters more than a tidy theoretical boundary. They even suggest that the domain could probably be split into three bands. They do not fully map that out here, but they leave it hanging as a sensible next step. The tone stays loose, chatty, and self-correcting throughout. They close by inviting listener ideas and saying they enjoyed the research because the topic was worth the time.

As heard by us

A broad aerobic zone only helps if it is split into usable chunks.

The episode treats training zones as something runners can actually use, not as a neat chart on a page. Alain and Dan move through the moderate intensity domain, LT1, and VO2 max percentages in a loose but still technically grounded way, keeping the main point in view: one label…

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Why you'd press play

When one aerobic zone hides a lot of different work.

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