Let’s talk about speed
This has been a great training cycle for me. I feel lean and strong and have no injuries.
One of the things I have been doing more of this cycle is speed work.
This is an area where my coach and I haven’t always seen eye to eye. He is a Lydiard-style, effort-based coach. He wants you to train in specific effort zones, or heart rate zones. He believes that if you build a good engine the speed will take care of itself.
I, on the other hand, have a history of beating myself into qualification shape through focused speed work.
We are both right.
He is right in that, especially for the longer distances, fitness is more important than speed. It doesn’t matter how fast you can turn over your feet if you’re walking at mile 20.
But, I’m right too. If you want to run faster, you have to practice running faster. That speed work makes you stronger at all paces. That speed work can give you the strength to weather the storm of a marathon.
I know what I’m looking for from the speed work. I’m looking for what I call ‘pop’. When your legs have pop you feel bouncy and strong. You feel like you can throw in surges and then recover quickly. That’s pop. That’s leg strength.
Coach will try to give me leg strength through non-running workouts, like lunges and squats. These are fine, but they are not the same as running fast. It’s different. Those exercises provide some muscle strength, but it is in isolation.
When you get out on a track or on the road and push your legs into the speed zone it is a holistic strength exercise. You are pushing your legs to their limit, to the edge, or even the point of failure. At the same time, you are pushing the rest of the support systems, your heart, your lungs, your core muscles all to the edge or point of failure.
Speed work is the only place you find your edge. You find your limit.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate doing speed work. It hurts. I dread those workouts. The whole point is to push to failure. But I know that by finding that edge I accomplish many good things in my training.
First, I find out where that edge is and what it feels like. These repeated dalliances beyond the edge of your ability builds familiarity with the discomfort and takes the emotional sting out of it. It numbs you to that effort. You know the effort. You understand the effort.
Second, running beyond that threshold moves the threshold. Each time you go beyond, each time you stretch that boundary, you are moving the boundary of what you can do.
Third, you start to burn in the paces. You start to understand organically what those paces feel like. You develop a certain rhythm at those paces that you can carry into your races.
You might not be able to carry those paces into a longer race, but you can certainly carry the confidence and the rhythm into your races.
Like any other training methodology, you can’t just do it once and expect benefit. You have to work through a cycle of speed work to see those changes.
That’s why I’m happy that coach has really leaned in on the speed work this training cycle. I think a contributing factor is that he knows I already have the aerobic fitness. That’s not in doubt. But, I need to find the pace to qualify. I need to move that boundary.
If you are speed work curious, your first question might be ‘how fast?’ A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to do a 1600 at your target marathon pace minus 1 minute. If you’re trying to run a 4-hour marathon at a 9-minute pace then a 1600 at 8 minutes per mile should be right around your edge.
You probably won’t start with 1600’s. Those are hard. You’ll probably start with 800’s, which we commonly refer to as ‘Yassos’ due to a workout invented by veteran marathoner Bart Yasso. This is a great way to introduce yourself to speed.
The way this workout goes is that you find a track or treadmill or flattish piece of ground and you run 800 meter (or ½ mile) repeats at that speed pace (try 1 minute per mile faster than your goal pace). See how many of those you can do before you fail. In between each rep you run a recovery rep of the same time.
For instance, I have been running the 800s in 3:30 because my goal marathon finish time is 3:30. After each rep I jog 3:30 to recover. I do 10 of these in a row. You might not be able to do 10 or you may be able to do more.
When I say ‘failure’, in this instance we define failure as when your form starts to break. That’s when you know you’ve done enough. When your form breaks you stop.
Over time if you work this workout into your training, you’ll find it’s easier to maintain that pace and that form. Your body figures it out. You get stronger and faster.
The other pace I use for longer speed work is a what I’ll refer to as tempo pace. Tempo is not a very well-defined term, but in general it can be any pace faster than your goal race pace but slower than your speed work pace. To make it easy let’s say 30 seconds per mile faster than your goal marathon pace. That will be somewhere around your 5K pace.
For a longer step up run I’ll try to finish that last step as close to that tempo pace as possible. You should be able to hold that tempo pace for 2-3 miles.
The beauty of speed work is that if you have never done it as part of your training you will see impressive results. It’s one of the rare secret weapons in running. And once you have that speed you know it’s there. You know you can always go get it if you need to.
All it takes is a cycle of focused speed work.
The caution is that speed work is also a great way to break yourself. You will be putting more stress on your muscles and joints. If you have a weak link, you’ll find it doing speed work. It’s important to ease into it and get a coach’s help if you can.
It’s easy to overdo the speed work. It doesn’t do you any good if you break yourself or if you can’t recover.
In conclusion, yeah, I’ve been doing a fair amount of speed work and it feels good. I’m also as light as I’ve ever been and I’m doing the core work and stretching to keep up with it.
Speed work.
It aint easy, but it will move the needle and it give you strength and confidence.