Yesterday VeloNews published an article that clearly explains the statistic called VO2max in a fashion that beginning endurance athletes can understand. The article argues that many experienced endurance athletes “can recite the definition of VO2max, but few have a good grasp of what VO2max really means.”
This article and a forthcoming article about lactate threshold will attempt to explain the roles that these statistics play in providing a picture of athletic fitness.
I think this discussion of VO2max is better than most because it includes an illustration of why VO2max by itself cannot necessarily be used to predict the result of a head-to-head competition between two trained athletes. VO2max and lactate threshold together are a better predictor of the winner of a bike race in the mountains than is VO2max alone. This is one reason why Lance Armstrong was seen using a Lactate Pro during training in the TV series The Lance Chronicles that aired on OLN last year.