Physiological Testing at BCSM

I apologize that the recent postings are a little out of order but things have been super busy lately. The whole tax crunch has of course made things a bit hectic, but I have also been doing my fair share of training and finally turning myself back into an athlete! No, my knee is not 100% quite yet, but I am doing a few short runs here and there and monitoring it very closely. I did, however, do my first Lactic Threshold (LT) Test since September of 2006 on Thursday. Surprisingly, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. As a matter of fact, it was actually much better than both Neal and I were anticipating...even after taking lots of time off this past winter.

For those of you who haven't been through the grueling procedure (I'm only kidding - it's really not bad at all) it goes as followed. It starts with a 20min easy warm up, then you increase the watt load by 20-40watts every 5min or so. Each time you increase the load, your finger gets pricked (which hurts more than the damn test itself) and the lactic levels in your blood are measured. When your body produces a certain level of lactate, that is the watt load you should be able to sustain for an hour worth of work. There is way more science behind it and there is a reason I am an accountant and not a doctor, however, I do know that this is a very important number to know so that training zones can be set accordingly.

Click on the pic above to see all the other fun stuff the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine offers...all right in our backyard. Gosh, we're such spoiled athletes here :)