Highway to HYROX Episode 3: Why Threshold Training Matters

I think the big one is that I initially, when I started my training process, kind of at the end of, uh, maybe like mid-August, beginning of August, I had...

I really wanted to do a 5K, and then I was gonna do HYROX in November, and the 5K was, well, it just happened this last weekend.

It was early October.

And the problem with that is I kind of realized early into it that training for a 5K was gonna be extremely challenging because it involves a lot of speed and very s- like a lot of specificity, I'll say.

To kind of really try to get a fast 5K time, you have to spend some time at 5K pace or faster.

And threshold stuff is, is important, but it's, it's kind of more about being specific to the 5K.

And so I was trying to do these 5K workouts and then also trying to do HYROX workouts, and then I was also trying to kind of work in some thrush- threshold workouts.

And I realized early on that if I was trying to do all of these different things, I was gonna be not able to recover from it.

It was just too much load, especially the 5K workouts are a lot on the body.

And so I had to kind of make this decision of, "Am I going to focus on the 5K, or am I gonna focus on HYROX?" And so sort of decided, well, I'm gonna focus on HYROX training and kind of let the 5K be what it is.

I'm gonna do some speed, but I'm not gonna be able to overload my body.

Like, last year when I did this 5K, I was able to do specific training for the 5K.

So if I had a really hard 5K workout, I would have a couple days of recovery in between.

But because I was trying to fit in two HYROX workouts, this 5K workout, and a threshold workout, it was, like, basically four workouts in a week.

And so I wasn't able to sort of do everything I was wanting to do.

Mm, it was just too much to try to recover from.

So I just knew that I probably wasn't gonna go into this 5K being able to complete it or, or as fast as I was last year.

And so, yeah, I, I just ended up sort of doing a little bit of this, these 5K workouts, but kind of scaling them back so that they weren't taking out so much.

It wasn't so hard on my body that it wasn't recoverable from, and that I was still able to kind of get these other workouts in.

And so I think I've kind of figured it out.

I was s- struggling a little bit early o- on with this, trying to, trying to balance it all, and now I feel like I'd figured it out.

I got the 5K done, and now I can kind of focus a little bit more on the HYROX training portion and the run around that, you know, the running piece around that and, and the strength.

So, um, let's see.

To kind of back up a couple weeks here, I, I think when I last talked, I, I released the episode on Tuesday the 22nd.

So Monday the 21st, I was able to do an easy run.