Adam’s journal
Not long ago, my friend David decided to run a 5-kilometer race that was taking place at dusk. For much of this season, David has been in hot pursuit of a time goal he’d set for himself, and he’d come achingly close — but no cigar — on several occasions. He hoped this race, which boasted a flat course, might be the one.
Unfortunately, while David ran well, he did not quite attain the time he’d aimed for. David trains almost exclusively in the morning, although he did throw in a few evening sessions in the days leading up to the race. Is it possible that the late hour of the race affected his performance?
Dr. Prescott prescribes
When it comes to athletic performance, specificity is the name of the game. If you want to do well in a hilly bicycle race, the best way to prepare is — you guessed it — by spending a lot of time riding your bike up and down hills. So, it would seem to follow that you’d expect your best race performances to come at the time of day you customarily train.
A few years back, University of North Texas researchers put this hypothesis to the test. Over a fiveweek period, they studied a dozen college-age women engaged in high-intensity exercise. They randomly divided the women into two groups of six, then had each group undergo four sessions of high-intensity cycling each week. The only difference between the two groups is that one trained in the morning each day, while one trained in the afternoon.
At the conclusion of the five-week training, the researchers tested the women’s performances twice — once at the time they had trained each day and once at a different time. In both groups, they found a significant correlation between performance and “temporal specificity.” In other words, they found that the women performed significantly better at the time of day when they’d trained regularly.
If your friend David has grown accustomed to doing high-intensity training in the early morning, his best shot at an optimal performance will likely come at an early morning race.
But he shouldn’t look for me there; I’ll most likely be optimizing my sleeping performance.
[ask-drp]
