Anaerobic Shortage following Daily Suggested Workouts

I’ve found that anaerobic work gets skipped or postponed on days where the readiness score is lower. I also didn’t start getting much anaerobic work until I started the build and now peak phases of training — how soon is your race?

Yes, I have had some anaerobic shortage with a 5k plan.

Don't worry. You don't need to plug in anaerobic work. Building anaerobic capacity can detract from your aerobic/threshold capacity which is essential for endurance races. The opposite is true for shorter track races.

It is more important that your pace targets for threshold and base are right. It is also more important to recover properly.

If you are a well trained endurance runner, your 10k pace will be slightly higher than your threshold pace. If you are a week-end warrior, it will be the threshold pace.

For base workouts, your HR should stay in zone 2 for 90% of the workout. If it gets in zone 3 more often, you are going too fast. 

Low, long aerobic training are in fact the best way to build threshold capacity. Threshold workouts give you a nice boost before a race and these gains might be more temporary. 

Hi, its just under a month away. I'm in the peak phase now as of 4 days ago.

Thanks - i'm wondering then:

Is the Training Status > Load Focus that tells me there is an Anaerobic Shortage unrelated to the 10k Training Plan and its various phases?

My threshold pace for a run it's suggesting later in the week is 8:15/mi - my 10k prediction is 49:39 which would be around 7:58/mi - does that sound right?

My goal pace is 7:20/mi - though i'm going to struggle to do that as I think the race comes too soon after my return from injury and a general slackening off post lockdown. Life is busy sometimes !!

I've been doing the base runs at 142bpm vs a LTHR of 168-170 for about 9 weeks now and am finally starting to see some ease in mainting a consistent pace at that bpm rather than the drift that was initially happening.

Garmin doesn't explain in details how they determine the DSW. Based on my experience, the design and periodization of a race plan is guided by not constrained by the load focus. Clearly, a race plan can get you in a slightly unbalanced load focus. Also, the load focus is not specific to your having a race plan or not. I see a balance load focus as an overarching goal for balanced training in general of course, but also to expose the watch to various level of efforts so that its models get the latest data across the spectrum of intensity/duration.

The race predictor on the watch is using your VO2 max and your training history in general. Therefore it will integrate your actual PBs, but as data points amongst others if recent enough. In other words, you might be able to exceed the prediction or under-perform simply because of your overall fitness level measured by the watch (your aerobic capacity is a performance enabled/limiter) and how you recently trained. The watch cannot read the future. Nothing can, as far as I know.

Therefore take the metrics as general guidance from a trending perspective.

As I said above, the most relevant data is your threshold pace (for flat courses) or running power as this will be what you should be able to sustain/exceed slightly during a 10k. Of course everybody is different: elite marathoners can run a 2h+ whole marathon at 95% of their threshold running power, but week-end warriors might struggle to run 30-40mn at their threshold power.

It seems to me that 8:15mn/mi target for a thredshold workout is a bit low if your target is 7:20mn/mi for the race. Keep in mind that virtually all Garmin training metrics heavily depend on Max HR. Your Max HR should be close to your last 5k PB peak HR plus 5bpm.

Assuming your HR Max is OK, the watch is telling you your are a bit far from your goal. It is up to you to decide whether the training data is sandbagging your capabilities, readiness, motivation, etc.

Just keep in mind that if your training shows you are really struggling to sustain your target pace continously for distance/duration below a 10k, it is unlikely you will achieve it (safely) during a race, even taking into account the extra race-day motivation.