Perfect for 1km repeat. A turn around Yishun Pond is 1km.
You have completed your maiden race finishing the five kilometre distance in a respectable time of fifty five minutes. The racing bug has bitten you really bad and you want to better this time by fifteen minutes. There is another race in three months, enough time for you to train to meet your target of five kilometres in forty minutes. You take stock and try to figure out how to achieve this target. You know you can go the distance, but you were panting heavily and you feel that you were struggling to keep a regular pace. There are then two areas you need to address, your strength and endurance and keeping the pace to nail your target finishing time.
Both of these areas can be addressed by the repeats workout.
Repeat workouts increases VO2 max and improves metabolic fitness by training the body to clear quickly the lactic acids produced during muscular activity. These physiological adaptations manifest themselves in improvement in strength and endurance.
Repeats are essentially High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), type workouts. They are low volume, you run shorter distances, but high intensity, you run at a fast pace, i.e. tempo. In practice, these are workouts where you would run repetitions of a short distances with a short rest between repetitions. Initially you will start with four repetitions and increasing to ten repetitions. Depending on your goals you may vary the distance and the pace.
Runners who perform repeat workouts have these three goals; to build strength and endurance, to improve mental resilience and to train to run at their race pace to achieve the target finishing time.
I have earlier discussed the repeats for building strength and endurance. In this piece I will illustrate how to perform the repeats for nailing your target race pace. 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 memorise your race pace. Repeats will allow your muscles to intuitively identify the pace you want and keep that pace. Have you seen how top chefs are able to chop onions finely without looking at the onions, while talking to you and not cut their fingers? That comes with repeatedly chopping onions. Their fingers and knife hand glide intuitively. No thinking required, just do it. Its the same here with repeat for pace. It is also the same at work, read enough profit and loss statements , and you will intuitively spot aberrations early enough to mitigate and rectify the situation.
Typically repeats for pace are done at shorter distances of four hundred meters up to a thousand meters. The distance is short enough for you to correct your pace after each repetition but also long enough for the muscles to respond and memorise the pace. You will need to run the repeats at a precise pace. For example for a forty minutes five kilometres, you will need to repeat your four hundred metres in three minutes twelve seconds. A simple calculation is needed to come up with the target time.
Progression to repeats for pace will be increasing the number of repeats in the next session. I usually also increase the distance. You do not want to increase the pace as you want your muscle to memorise this pace as your race pace. The table here details the target time for each distance repeat.
Target times for repeats for a 40 minutes 5km
An interesting and famous repeat is the Yasso 800. This is a good predictor of your marathon finish. Bart Yasso, postulated and proved that your time in minutes and seconds for a workout of 10 times 800 meters with equal recovery time is the same as the hours and minutes of your marathon time. That means if you can nail 3mins 30 sec for 10, 800 metres repeats. You should be able to finish the marathon in a Boston qualifying, of 3hours 30 minutes if you are fifty and over.
Repeats are a fun variation to your runs and will help you achieve your target finish time. Repeats for pace is rote learning for your muscles to memorise your race pace.