The Long Tempo
Getting comfortable with discomfort
The long tempo run is a lot like life. You work on yourself until you have a good capability, you take that capability to the edge and you see how long you can hold it.
Running at the edge takes the sharpest form of discipline. It’s easy to run slow. There is no pain. You are well within your capacity to do it. You are not close to the edge.
It is also easy to go all out. To spend everything in a sprint. There is not discipline there. There may be pain, but it is brief and mindless.
To run tempo, you need a mental hardness. You need the strength to be able to go to the edge and hold it. Like holding your hand on a hot stove, just short of burning but forcefully uncomfortable.
Long tempo is where the racer lives. It is where the professionals live. It is race pace or better for an extended time. In this way you learn what racing feels like. You learn where your failure point is, both physical and mental.
This is a great life skill. To be able to go to the edge and hold it. To be able to spend time in that discomfort zone.
At first, it is merely to survive there. How long can you hold that effort? That pace? Before breaking?
Then it becomes a management issue. How do you manage the effort in that zone successfully?
And, finally, it becomes a place to live, a place to savor.
You become at home in the discomfort zone. You relax into the effort and the pain. That discomfort and pain starts as an assault on you but you eventually cross the barrier and it becomes part of who you are and what you do.
Something you own.
Something you are at home with.
And that is a superpower.
The long tempo in practice:
How does this work?
In general, a good tempo run consists of a warm up, a tempo segment and a cool down.
The tempo segment can either be down by time or by distance. The distance or time you commit to the tempo segment will be based on your ability, where you are in your training and your goal race.
For example; if your target race is a 10K, you might have a 3 or 4-mile tempo. If your target race is a marathon it might be an 8 or 10 mile tempo.
You can program these into your smart watch. If you are doing it by pace make sure to make the pace range big enough, like plus or minus 10 seconds, so your watch isn’t nagging all the time.
Warm up for a couple miles. Then ease into a pace that is 5-10 seconds per mile faster than your race pace. Hold that pace for the tempo distance or time. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have a hilly course or a flat track.
Although you want the terrain you train on to be similar to the terrain of your target event. You can absolutely do tempo in the trails. You just do it by effort level instead of pace.
While you’re in the tempo focus on your form. Listen to what your body is telling you. Feel where the constraints are as you work your way through the time.
You may find that your breathing is a constraint.
You should be breathing but not struggling for breath. If you are struggling for breath focus on that breathing. Big inhales through the nose and mouth. Expand that whole chest and abdomen. Feel the breath. Blow the breaths out with intention. Practice breathing fully and with intention. Get into a nice, comfortable rhythm.
You may find it’s your legs that are the constraint. Or maybe certain muscles are fatiguing. Try to relax those muscles and fix your form. Focus on running lightly. That’s a great mantra when you’re struggling in your tempo: “Run Lightly”. Fast turnover. Hips forward. Upright. Light feet.
It should not be a struggle. You can fight it for a bit, but if your form breaks you can stop and reset. If speedwork is part of your normal training these workouts won’t be that hard. Maybe an 8.5 on the 1-10 scale.
What you are practicing with tempo is racing. You don’t want to practice struggling along with bad form. You want to practice running at or close to your edge with good form. If your form starts to break, back off a little until you can sustain the effort.
My experience is that you tend to go out to fast in these tempo runs. It takes a while to figure out what a sustainable effort or pace is. It takes practice. Don’t get discouraged.
If you’ve never done this kind of work before it will take a few workouts to get used to it. You may be sore after. You may have to take walk breaks initially. It’s ok. Take a moment to shake out your legs, catch your breath and see if you can’t settle back into the tempo at a more sustainable pace.
Let me tell you my long tempo story from this week. It’s a sad story!
Coach gave me a long tempo to do Tuesday night. I saw this on my calendar and recoiled in terror.
It was a 1:30 tempo. That’s a 20 minute warmup, 1 hour of tempo and a 10 minute cool down. That’s a hard workout on a good day.
I was still leg sore from the previous week which culminated in a 3 hour long run. I knew I couldn’t do this tempo in the trails. The snow was too deep and too soft. I’d have to do it on the road.
Looking at my work calendar I’d have to do it at night. In the dark. In the cold. On the road. With the cars.
But I was committed to getting through the week and doing all the workouts, because I knew this was the dark part of my training cycle where I would put on a crushing load so that I would be ready to race in April. You have to do the work if you want the results.
I haven’t been running on the roads much. I’ve been trying to keep my training in the trails, where it’s easier on my old legs and I can take Ollie Wollie the Killer Collie with me.
Not only was this workout going to be hard, it was going to be different. A different leg motion. A different impact and stride.
When I hit the tempo part of the workout I put too much coal in the furnace and ended up too fast. I took a walk beak after a mile or so and tried to back off. My legs were like cement. Especially my quads. I had nothing. I just kept backing off the pace and taking walk breaks.
I completed the workout. It was awful. I was way off my pace. My legs were killing me. I was sore the next day.
But, that is the whole point of training. To learn where you are. And I learned that I’m not in any kind of road racing shape! That being said, I was happy with the effort, with getting out, with getting it done. I knew that these kinds of workouts that are awful and hard and stay with you for days are the key building blocks in a successful training campaign.
So, my friends, your assignment is simple. Work a tempo run into your training each week and learn something about who you are.