Jeff, how do you differentiate hard and REALLY hard workout (and race effort)? This question coming from someone who only understands easy and hard, and now there're 3 shades of hard?
A really hard workout is one that you are not sure you will be able to complete. Usually it is preceded by a dark and unpleasant feeling in the stomach.
I think that usually when we talk about hard efforts in training, we are talking about efforts that take a lot of recovery. This is sorta different from what I am talking about, as the two workouts I described in my initial post wouldn't necessarily need a ton of recovery, but they are workouts that take an almost-race-level focus to complete.
The Logic of Long Distance
The King of Beasts
That is 5 x 1000 meters in sub 3. If you could keep up, racing it or not, that is impressive.
no, I was kidding. the guys kept saying 10k pace on the warm up, when we got started they took off like scalded dogs. they ran about 5 flat and I was 5 - 7 seconds back.
But like jeff was saying re: really hard workout - on the second rep I decided to really let it go, not give a fuck about tomorrow or even the next rep and just give it everything to try and keep up.
"As a dreamer of dreams and a travelin' man I have chalked up many a mile. Read dozens of books about heroes and crooks, And I've learned much from both of their styles." ~ Jimmy Buffett
"I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way."”
Interestingly, I think that people are more likely to go to the well and do very hard running when they do tempo runs for marathon training than they are when they do their speed work. Should it be the opposite?
That makes sense because most people make marathons their goal races, so their biggest and most race-specific workout would be in that range.
I don't think the study--or the way this thread started--had to do with hard workouts vs. REALLY hard workouts. It was about intensity: tempo vs. faster stuff like 5k. I think we all agree that REALLY hard workouts should be done sparingly, in general, and should come toward the end of a training cycle, right?
As for which pace to do workouts at, a Goorun pointed out, the answer is not either, it's both.
The study looked at the short term benefits of doing exclusively "high-intensity" (in running terms 3k-5k pace) workouts versus exclusively "medium intensity" (lets say 10k to marathon pace in running terms) workouts. I think we all know that doing intervals at 5k pace will produce more immediate results than lots of tempo runs--but we also know those gains tend to be short lived and that over the long term we get more more return from tempo runs. So if you have a 5k coming up, duh, do some high intensity workouts.
It wasn't what the study looked at but to me the interesting question is how much high intensity work should we be mixing in year round--even when we are not close to a goal race of any kind. I think the answer is greater than none but less than a lot.
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That makes sense because most people make marathons their goal races, so their biggest and most race-specific workout would be in that range. It wasn't what the study looked at but to me the interesting question is how much high intensity work should we be mixing in year round--even when we are not close to a goal race of any kind. I think the answer is greater than none but less than a lot.
That is true that if in marathon training, the hardest workouts would be the long specific stuff.
How much fast running to mix in? It's a good question. Hard to answer in the abstract. I know I went years without running anything faster than 5k pace except for strides. I think that was problematic and that part of the reason I didn't approach my college times in my early 30s was not enough intensity in the schedule. A little goes a long way, but some is also much better than none.
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