Isn’t it incredibly frustrating that every time you seem to be making progress with fitness and training, you go and get injured or get a cold? Then you inevitably try and push through the pain and fatigue, because you’re a hard-core athlete and rest is for the weak, making everything worse.Â
 This was certainly the story from my first couple of seasons of triathlon training. Due to injury and illness I couldn’t progress in my training, having cycles of improvement for a couple of months only to lose it again in a few weeks by getting ill or picking up an injury. After 9 months off with an Achilles injury forcing me to miss the London Marathon, followed by a season of knee niggles and frequent colds, I was left searching for a new philosophy of training. Although my times had been coming down with my interval-based, high intensity training strategy, I was only making incremental improvements due to training inconsistency forced upon me by injury and illness. This was when I stumbled upon Dr. Phil Maffetone and his MAF training philosophy.Â
 Dr. Phil Maffetone is a US-based physician and sports coach, formerly named Coach of the Year by Triathlon Magazine, and famously coached Ironman triathlete Mark Allen to a record 6 Ironman Kona World Championship victories from 1989-1995. He approached training from a viewpoint of trying to maximise athlete’s health, aiming for consistency in training - exactly what I needed!
So far, so good. This guy had pretty good credentials, so I thought he was worth looking into. This is where his philosophy got weird compared to what I was hearing in the triathlon community.Â
Maffetone’s method suggests that running slower, at a lower heart-rate, and eating more fat and fewer carbohydrates would massively improve my performance. This was seemingly the polar opposite to what everyone else I was training with was doing. They were all going out and blasting themselves with intervals and threshold sessions 4/5 times a week and fuelling on white pasta, bread and jam. However, frustrated at the small gains I was making previously, I delved further into Maf’s teachings.
 He employs a MAF formula, a Maximum Aerobic Function heart-rate formula, for calculating a heart-rate that a majority, if not all your training should be completed at. The formula is roughly 180- your age. Then you can add 5bpm or reduce by 5/10bpm based on various caveats like whether you’ve been inconsistent your training due to injury (guilty) and whether you’ve had more than 2 colds a year (guilty). Check out his website for more detailed information: https://philmaffetone.com/method/
The basic idea is that, at a lower heart-rate than your previous training is likely to have been, you train your body to burn more fat. This means that you have an additional fuel source (as your body can only store a limited amount of carbohydrate as glycogen) for your longer events, avoiding the dreaded bonk, but also can sustain higher intensities for longer, with fat fuel and carbohydrate fuel working together to improve performance. In addition, slowing down can help improve running form, helping to avoid injuries, and prevent you from over-training, making you less susceptible to illness.
For me, my MAF heart-rate was 155bpm. This took me from my typical training pace at 7.00min/mile to 8.40-9.00min/mile, with my slowest miles being nearer 9.30min/mile. It was so slow compared to what I was used to. I almost gave up during the first couple of weeks. However, I persevered. I decided if I was going to put the time into training at this heart rate, I had to fully commit and change my diet too. If it was a total waste of time I would have only lost a few months. I won’t go into all the changes I made during this post, I’ll save those for the future. What I will say though, is that relatively quickly my times started tumbling. From that initial pace of 9min/mile over 3 miles at 155bpm, my running form has improved, my energy levels are much higher, and I have recently run 17miles (before breakfast, without gels or water) at 155bpm at an average pace of 7.08min/mile. That’s a MASSIVE gain in a relatively short space of time. I’ve taken 3 minutes of my 5k PB, with that now down to 17.56, and taken almost 6 minutes off my half-marathon time, which stands at 1.26.01. I’ve also only had one or two colds in the last 18 months, and have only picked up one minor injury (but that one was my own fault).Â
Over the coming weeks I’ll be bringing you my training experience from the past 18 months, the diet I’m currently following, and the build up to my early-season races of 2017. I hope you explore the MAF method. It’s changed my training and racing, allowing me to realistically target a 1.20.00 half-marathon and a place on the GB Age-Group Triathlon team this year.Â
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