Perceived effort

Perceived exertion is a term that is used a lot in endurance sports. It is the philosophy that you should not necessarily be exercising to a specific pace or time for a workout, but rather to how hard or easy the workout feels. A 7 minute/mile pace can feel very different  one day versus another. This can be proven on the bike where watts measure how much power you are exerting and can wildly vary regardless of pace.

To illustrate this point, the last two days I ran the usual 6.6 mile route. On Saturday, I purposely ran a little harder than normal to try and improve my speed. My time wasn’t dramatically faster (48.41) than I usually do but it did feel a little harder. Today, I wanted to run a chill workout and forced myself to run slower, at least a perceived slower pace, and ended up running 30 seconds faster (48.11) but felt better than yesterday. It’s good to try and understand how a certain pace feels so when you go into a race, you have a good idea for how you are going to feel at a specific level of exertion,

With CrossFit , there is no consideration of perceived effort because you are supposed to go all out on every workout . Other than the incredibly infrequent long runs, every workout is pretty much anaerobic. Workouts like 60 minute runs at 70% of maximum heart rate don’t exist. 

Which is why I don’t understand how doing 20 minute all out workouts of pushups, squats, kettle bell swings, etc. prepares you for running 26 miles at 8 minute pace. Yes, it gets you into shape but how does it do anything to prepare you mentally, let alone physically for how you will feel after two hours of a marathon. It’s like preparing to cook a Thanksgiving dinner by learning to become a gardener.