Training the bottleneck.

Yesterday, as I spun indoors again (and counting days) I decided to try a single 4 minute VO2max effort - first one in over 2 months. It went pretty well, but as I was putting the hurt on myself an interesting VO2max analogy occurred to me.

VO2max is like a bottleneck. For some it's narrower, for others wider, but they are always the limiting factor to our performance. Unless one is asthmatic or has some other pathological pulmonary challenge, the amount of air we take in is always adequate for our purposes. It is what happens between the lungs and our muscle cells that defines the amount of "talent" that we have as endurance athletes. Bottlenecks are somewhat flexible and thus trainable, but only so much. Also, young bottlenecks are likely to be more flexible than older ones. I'm no physiologist, but in this moment of enlightenment it occurred to me that the reason VO2max decreases with age is not because it just magically shrinks, but because like everything else in our bodies it becomes less flexible. Much like (or perhaps precisely like) our arteries and capillaries becoming more rigid over time. This is why those who engage in sports most of their life see considerably less of a decrease.

I decided that visualizing a stretchy bottleneck kind of like an aorta, and trying to squeeze as many red-blood cells through it as possible, may be helpful while doing VO2max intervals. Yeah, some people listen to music or watch television. I lose myself in visions of gooey aortas.

Oh, and one more thing. Since VO2max of a race horse is said to be 180, I'm officially coining the phrase "VO2maxed like a horse".