Zone 2 in the Wild
It's time to take Zone 2 training outdoors—engaging in activities that will not only diversify your training but also enhance your aerobic workouts with a spirit of adventure.
It's time to take Zone 2 training outdoors—engaging in activities that will not only diversify your training but also enhance your aerobic workouts with a spirit of adventure.
It's time to take Zone 2 training outdoors—engaging in activities like rucking, hiking, open water swimming, stand-up paddleboarding, rollerblading, cross-country skiing and its summertime alternative, roller skiing, as well as rowing, kayaking, outrigger canoeing, prone paddleboarding, gravel cycling, and trail running. These activities will not only diversify your training but also enhance your aerobic workouts with a spirit of adventure.
Crossing the Grand Canyon this weekend will be an interesting marker for my aerobic training. Six months ago, I began to train nearly exclusively in Zone 2, averaging five sessions of 60 to 90 minutes each. That doesn’t feel like a lot of training time—criss-crossing the Grand Canyon will pack the equivalent of a month’s worth of training into less than 36 hours.
Last year it took me 23+ hours to round trip:
Has my mitochondrial density increased enough to shave a few hours off that time? Follow along while I share the experience.
If you want to support us as we once again raise money to support Alzheimer’s and ALS research, then you have our full gratitude. If I receive your information in time, I’ll also send you a postcard from Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the canyon. You don’t even need to give to receive—comment or DM any words of encouragement and support and I’ll send you a postcard!
In the words of our hike organizer, Run2Revive, we vow to never take our mind or our body for granted. Getting this opportunity to push our physical and mental limits fills us with gratitude as we fight to prevent and cure both Alzheimer’s and ALS.
Oh, and judging by the looks of this, there is no better time to visit the Grand Canyon:
Humans have remarkable endurance capabilities compared to many other animals, especially those that struggle to dissipate heat over prolonged periods of exertion. Persistence hunting, which involves outlasting prey, proved to be a significant evolutionary advantage even in the absence of sophisticated tools or weapons.
Building an aerobic base while developing our metabolic and cardiolytic pathways taps directly into this evolutionary strength, reactivating what makes us uniquely human. Speaking of which, our exploring this topic together aligns with our capacity to form tribes and cooperate, the transfer of knowledge and skills, and for those who engage back, the formation of social networks and alliances.
Just saying.
Even while training alone, you also get to enjoy the meditative aspects of training and the cognitive benefits that come with optical flow, enhancing our overall well-being.
Extraordinary distance swimmer Lynne Cox swam the English Channel at age fifteen and broke the men’s and women’s records. Her mentor trained her to prepare mentally so she could use all her energy for the swim:
Whenever I saw him, he’d say, “The ocean is God’s greatest and most beautiful creation.” When he did his daily swims off Long Beach, he meditated. He asked what I thought about when I swam, and I told him: I focused on my breath—on the sounds of my inhales and exhales; on the long streams of bubbles released into the water. I felt myself move through the water, and felt how it lifted and flowed around me. For hours I listened to the sounds of my hands capturing water and pulling me across the sea. Sometimes, I felt at one with the water. He told me that I meditated, too.
While we are out and about in the great outdoors, let’s double down by being at our best. Whether you are rucking a wooded trail, mounting biking some tumultuous terrain, or SUPing it at sunrise, let’s harness that big engine we are building and really breathe it all in.
This is how elite SUP competitor and coach April Zilg counsels her athletes:
As a coach, the NUMBER ONE mistake I see people making is not developing their aerobic system.
Training at a slower heart rate doesn't have to mean your speeds drop to a crawl (although you may have to go through a brief mesocycle of "crawling" depending on how aerobically deficient you are!).
April describes the difference between the Zone 2 Conditioned athlete from a metabolic point-of-view:
Those people that dropped you and those slow-pokes that passed you later on in the race were using more of their aerobic system, while you were relying more on your anaerobic system. It’s not an either-or scenario, we’re all using both aerobic and anaerobic pathways, but those other paddlers were using MORE aerobic metabolism than you, i.e. they were able to produce more ATP aerobically at the same speed.
Since you trained at that intensity all the time, and did not develop your aerobic system, when you need to paddle at an aerobic pace to let the anaerobic system catch back up (processing fuel to form ATP) your pace slows to an unbearable crawl. Throughout the race you relied more on anaerobic metabolism because you exceeded your aerobic threshold speed… by a lot. The larger the difference in your aerobic and anaerobic speeds, the sooner you will run out of steam, and the slower you will be when that steam does run out.
We all do it. It feels so good to gallop. When your steam runs out, you will fall back to that energy system driven by fat oxidation and lactate consumption in the slow twitch muscle fibers. Did you find it very slow going in your initial dozens of Zone 2 outings? Welcome to the club. And when you exert yourself enough, that’ll be your default engine as you struggle to finish a long outing. Let’s build that stronger engine.
In the meantime, take it outdoors!
