The Michigan (Read 124 times)

For the people not running 4:32 Pace for a 10K ...

I tried to do some elite workouts when I was in excellent aerobic shape ... huge amount of stamina running 100-130 miles per week and

LAT = 10.1 MPH

MP = 9.6 MPH

warmup

5@T

.5 Easy

4@T

.5 Easy

3@T

.5 Easy

2@T

.5 Easy

1 @T

Cooldown

Doing workouts like this broke me when I was on the middle of huge progress in speed.  Since then it hit me - This was built for people that run LAT at 4:36-4:50 Pace ~ Say 4:45 pace.  So they are running 23:45 / 19:00 / 14:15 / 9:30 / 4:45 minutes for the speed intervals for 1:11:15 total at LAT.  I was running 1:19:06 or 25% more time at LAT.  Basically I took an elite workout and make it harder.

I still think the Michigan is equal to an all out 10k race - Just packaged differently ... giving a different type of stress - Different is good to keep muscles growing and also give racers the ability to cover surges and recover.  If I every get into shape and focus on the 10k and to try the "Michigan" workout - I would treat it as a race effort and not a speed workout from a prep standpoint and I would likely shorten the 5k efforts to 1200-800-400-200 Or 1000-800-600-400

I got a lot of responses back on here.  The 5k+, 5k++, 5k+++ is indeed slightly faster than, much faster than, and then way faster than 5k pace.

 

The purpose of the workout is to teach your body to recover at tempo pace.  It's a great primer to condition you for an upcoming 5k or 10k, and can be altered to work with half marathon and marathon training.  It is the workout I fear, and yet one I want to get through.  And yes, it's mostly set aside for elite runners or college runners.  However, it can be scaled down to fit your needs.

 

The Tempo portion is just that, what you'd run for a tempo.  IE:  if i run a 5 mile tempo at 6:20 pace, then that's what i run the tempo in.

 

It's hard as hell, and make no mistake that you'll probably not finish it the first time you do it.

 

I read a lot of articles, and there are some where coaches say if you don't have a base of 50-55 miles per week, this workout will run you into the ground fast.

 

I guess I just wanted to get thoughts on it, since I'm planning to do it here in the next 2 weeks again.  The real Michigan has you running the tempo portions on the road and then back on the track for the faster intervals, but there seems to be confusion to me on if you take a jogging break btw those portions or literally run right from the track onto the pavement for the tempo.  If there are some former college runners that did this, I'd like to hear what you did.

This is the version I and a bunch of my internet running friends did on our NYE/NYD Michigan (the workout I linked from my log a couple posts back), and it does have jog recoveries to get to the road for the tempo. I guess I didn't really scale it down if that's actually the real deal, I just didn't scale UP at all.

Thanks Lauren for the feedback.  That was something I wasn't really sure of, since it calls for going to the road straight from the track.  A lot of the tracks I run at don't make this an easy transition.

 

1600 5:45

Mile 6:24

1200 4:13

Mile 6:24

800 2:47

Mile 6:24

400 1:17

 

That looks solid and has enough variation to get a VO2max benefit from the shorter reps.  So you're basically getting 2.5mi at 5k+ and 3mi of relaxed tempo.

 

Only in deepest Winter, amirite?

I don't think they run it anymore (the whole phone camera and internet thing killed it), but back in my day when they did, it was at midnight on the last day of the semester in late April.  So late April, not too cold, right?  Wrong.  It was 37 degrees that night senior year when I ran it.  With just a touch of flurries.  I'd say about 500 people ran, so in that cold you had about an 9:1 ratio of turtled shrinkage to glass-cutting nipples, give or take.

My Naked Mile story