All about that pace.

Nice run boss..... whoa, 1000+ miles on the year already! You're a beast!

If I keep up this mileage I may have to run another marathon this year. Sshhhh, don't tell Kym I said that :)

Did I hear Portland?

All I'm lacking is the reg. fee :(

Green River! I know, you're out of town.

I'm in town, but I have a CMA meeting... I may ask to be excused.

Did you use your "auto lap" on this run...? Oh sorry, didn't want to get you and Carl going again :-) Nice speed work. It makes me tired looking at it!

IJR - Ha ha, I did set autolap to .25 mile. It works amazingly well :) If I wanted to do 200's I would have to go to the track though, because it only goes 2 digits either side of the decimal point so no .125 for me. It's a lot more likely that I will go to 800's (.5) anyway once I can do 8 - 12 400's without a lot of pain. I'm going to try this again on Wednesday and continue at least once a week for a while.

I should ask Carl if these intervals are even fast enough. I really have no idea what I'm doing. I just ran as fast as I could hang on for a 1/4 mile the first day (78 sec or 5:15 pace) and then backed off to a still uncomfortable 82 sec or 5:30 pace and shortened up the rest period a little more for each of the last two speed workouts. I'm not sure I could even do 2 x 800 at that pace right now. Maybe I should research this...? Or maybe I should hire Carl as my coach :)

You're off to a good start with intervals.

If I were advising you I'd say you should start with longer intervals at a slower pace, and then work your way down to short er ones with more rest and a faster pace. And I wouldn't get too hung up on pace, either. I'd say start out with intervals of 3-6 minute length with equal rest, just make sure you are running at a comfortably hard effort and stop when you think you could only do one more. After that you could get more technical about distances, pace and recovery lengths.

Usually intervals of 1/4 to 3/4 mile are done at about 5k pace, with a recovery jog between each of 1/4-1/2 mile, depending on the length of the interval. Miles can be done at 5k or 10k pace, and anything longer is done at 10k pace or slower. The faster your pace on the intervals, the longer your recovery needs to be.

So what if my "goal" 5k pace is 5:48? Right now I think 6:00 - 6:05 is pretty realistic.

You want to run them based on current race best, not goal times.

OK now I'm really confused. If I can already run 3 miles at 6:05 pace, how is running 1/4 miles at that pace going to help me get faster? I thought the idea was to train my legs to go faster for a shorter distance and eventually stretch that distance out.

Sure Mike, there's value in doing that type of workout, too. If you want to develop raw speed, though, this is best done with shorter intervals of 100-150 meters run at between 1/2 mile and 2 mile race pace with long rests between and a total workout volume of only 1/2 - 1 mile.

The type of intervals I'm talking about, and Carl is talking about, is for developing your VO2max - your heart and lungs. Valuable training for any distance. Hopefully you can race a 5k in a competition much faster than you could run it on your own. But you can run shorter intervals multiple times at that pace, and recover much faster than from a race, allowing you do it again in a few days or so.

It's like lifting weights. Nobody trains by doing their 1-rep max every few days. Instead they do 80-90% of max, a few reps and a few sets. It gives a similar training stimulus as the all-out effort, but with less risk of injury or burnout.

Ultimately you want to be able to cover more mileage than race distance in a workout. For example, 8 x 1/2 mile at 5k pace with a 400m recovery would give you 4 miles of running at that pace. Obviously that's something you have to work up towards.

Phew, lengthy responses!

You have to train based on your current fitness, not on your goal.

To take it to an extreme, lets say you want to run a mile in 3:50 and a marathon in 2:01:59. How fast should those 1/4's be now?

3K to 5K race pace is the pace that will enhance your maximal aerobic capacity (VO2max). You should be doing intervals at about this pace. As your fitness improves, your interval pace will get faster.

The above workout you did was awesome! I love how you did 8 intervals, and then stopped because you were slowing down. I think you did a great job of challenging your VO2max and you'll see the benefits in the next several weeks!

You probably should only do this workout once a week though. Do a tempo run instead.

OK, I'll do a Tempo run on Wednesday...Oh, you weren't talking to me but I'll do one anyway :-)

I'm almost afraid to ask about tempo runs. Here goes... How far? How fast?

What do you think about this calculator? This seems to sum things up nicely and give me some target paces...

http://www.fasterrunning.com/oldsite/calculator2.htm

I like the calculator. It isn't too "noisy" like some of them are. Make sure you read the comments at the bottom of that web page.

When you enter a race time, you need to enter a true, current race performance, not your goal time. That's a common mistake made by many runners.

Tempo runs should be run at a "comfortably hard" pace. Use the calculator as a guideline. The pace should be the same pace that you would run if you were doing race that took you 1 hour to complete it.

Usually they are about 20 minutes long. Most of a marathoner's speed work should be tempo runs.

Check out the easy pace that the calculator computes for you. What do you think of that?

Personally I like McMillan's website. It is a bit more busy, but he gives you pace ranges instead of a single time. http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/calculator

The nice thing about tempo runs, Mike, is that they are simple. No fast, then slow, then fast, then slow. Just go out at a comfortably hard effort and hold it for 20-30 minutes. I usually run between 4-8 miles when training for a marathon, and the longer I go the slower I go.

@Scott: I like McMillans calculator too (especially now that it doesn't come with that stupid autoplaying music!), but it can get confusing.

He's added a whole new data field for "goal time". If you read all the instructions on the web page, it makes sense why he put it on there. But it's going to make some runners enter the wrong data.

I've used McMillan's calc before, but I've never seen such a simple explanation of the different types of runs like this one gives. The paces on this one look pretty reasonable for me too except for the easy/long run pace. I don't have enough time in my schedule to do my long runs that slow.

I had a feeling you wouldn't like the easy pace.

Try a week of doing most of your runs at an easy pace. You might find that you can do more on your hard days when you keep the easy days easy.

A nice way to make your long runs take less time is to incorporate speedwork into them. (e.g.: run easy, then do marathon pace, progress to tempo pace, and then cool down.)