400m sprint repeats on trail
Running long distances can be boring, especially if you’re doing small loops in a park or worse at the stadium track. This is a sure fire way to lose interest. Furthermore, simply running long slow distance workouts has limited advantage. LSD strengthens cardiovascular fitness and trains your body to utilize fats during the long runs. LSD does not build strength and endurance. For that, my opinion is that repeats at tempo pace are the best. Repeats are also a fun way to add variety to your runs. With repeats, you may actually run longer and faster in a single session that you would normally.
Repeats are essentially High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), type workouts. Repeats are low volume, you run shorter distances, but high intensity, you run at a fast pace, i.e. sprints to tempo. In practice, these are workouts where you would run repetitions of a short distances with a short rest between repetitions. The objective is to run each repeat at the same pace. That means completing the distance in a consistent time.
According to the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training (FIRST) repeat workouts increases VO2 max, and improves running speed and running economy resulting in improvement in metabolic fitness. The body is adapted to clear quickly the lactic acids produced during muscular activity. These physiological adaptations manifests in improvement in strength metabolic fitness.
Runners who perform repeat workouts have these three goals; to build strength and metabolic fitness, to improve mental resilience and to train to run at their race pace to achieve the target finishing time. Repeats build strength and endurance due to the physiological adaptations discussed earlier. The punishing pace will test and improve your mental endurance. You need to give it a go to see it. Performing repeats to nail your race pace is like practicing the piano or reciting the multiplication tables, very much rote learning. You are actually instructing your muscle to memorize your race pace.
Here I will discuss workouts for building strength and endurance. Workouts for nailing the race pace I will discuss in another post. Both workouts for building strength and endurance and for nailing the pace will improve your mental resilience.
For building strength and endurance you want to run your repeats from sprint to tempo pace, which most runners would describe as comfortably hard. To me tempo pace is the pace, where you will find it just about getting difficult to hold a conversation. You are not yet panting but breathing hard. Distances can range from 400 meters to 2km. The rest period between repeats is typically 1/5 of the time you take to complete the repeat. For example if you complete a repetition of 1 km in 5 minutes then you rest for 1 minute before you start your next repetition.
The 1km repeat workout. For progression increase the number of repeats by two in the next repeats workout.
Progression to repeats might be in terms of number of repeats or in terms of pace. Usually, I would increase the number of repeats until I can handle 10 repeats before progressing in terms of pace. When I increase the pace, I would start with six repeats and progress the number of repeats the following week.
In a variation to the repeat workout, recently I am trying out repeating tempo runs in the same workout. Usually runners will perform tempo runs of between ten to fifteen kilometres. I find that keeping the pace over such a distance somewhat a challenge, so to benefit from the training effect of a tempo run over fifteen kilometres without actually running the fifteen kilometres continuously, I would split up the distance into manageable portions. Much like setting and achieving smaller intermediate goals to achieve a bigger ultimate goal. Here is another link between running and life. If you cannot chew a big piece of pie but desire to have the entire pie, try biting off smaller pieces. Eventually you will have eaten the whole pie. At work, if you are a sales engineer and desire the director of sales role, then your ultimate goal is the be the sales director in 10 years. Your intermediate goals may then be, to become the top sales engineer in two years, then to obtain an MBA in three years, then to become the sales manager in five years and so on. Very soon you will have become the sales director.
Do try out repeats to build strength and metabolic fitness and improve your mental resilience. You will also find that these will add variety to your training and inject fun back into your workouts.