Week 11 of the beginner's schedule to running a marathon introduces the tempo run. I discovered the tempo run quite by accident. I wanted to run a regular 10k away from traffic, so I decided to use an athletics track. Up till then I was not very keen on using the track, because I used to be easily bored by the repetition involved. Still, I decided to try it out - 25 laps.
I started off at my normal training pace, setting off my stop watch. I noted the time after one lap, and again at the second. Timing each lap would be something to keep my mind occupied, so I decided to time each lap until completion. Then I noticed something surprising. The third lap was considerably faster than my usual 2 minutes per lap (equivalent to the 8-minute miling that I used to train at in those younger times). In fact, I had chipped exactly 10 seconds off 2 minutes in that third lap: 1m 50 seconds. It's easy to calculate - the seconds count was 10 seconds less than the previous. There's no need to involve the minutes to complicate the calculation.
This phenomenon repeated itself on all subsequent laps, and I ended up running the 10k considerably faster than my normal easy pace. So what had happened? Probably, the fact that I was timing each lap was a stimulus to maintain a solid pace. I attempted the same type of session one week later, with a similar result.
Months, if not years, later, I learned that this type of training is known as a tempo run. It's a form of speed training, where you train your body to keep up a sustained pace for a prolonged period. In fact, at a tempo run, you're running closer to the limit of your anaerobic threshold - the maximum possible oxygen intake and oxygen use at the same rate. Any much faster, and you'll get breathless, having crossed the limit into anaerobic activity, where you run into oxygen debt.
This type of session is very useful to enable you improve your times at races, i.e. by running faster without having to stop three-fourths of the way through exhaustion. You can carry it out at the same place as you do your interval training. Both types of session are quite similar, the difference being that a tempo run is like an averaged out interval session.
Again, you can have variations, the most obvious being the distance run. In fact, at the track I sometimes prefer to do 30 laps, using the first two laps for a warm-up, and mentally splitting the remaining 28 into 7 groups of 4 laps (one mile each). There's a lot of mind games involved in tempo running. To improve endurance at a faster pace, when I was really keen on running a good marathon, I used to do 40 laps - 10 miles - but I think that was a bit too much. Nowadays I'm quite happy to limit my tempo run to 10 km, and I would suggest that a beginner shouldn't exert him or herself more than this.
As for interval training, the same principle of hard day/easy day should apply. We have basically two types of speed training: intervals and tempo running. You may alternate between one and the other on successive weeks. Or within each week (rest, tempo, easy, intervals, easy, rest, long run). Alternation will give you the benefit of both types of training, while the hard day/easy day principle is essential to avoid the risk of overtraining or injury. Rest is necessary to enable regeneration of your muscle tissues.
There. That wasn't bad for a short entry to cover the Christmas period...
Week 11 - Monday to Sunday:
rest - 10k easy - 10k tempo - rest - 10k easy - rest - 80 minutes easy
Week 12 - Monday to Sunday:
rest - 10k easy - 10k intevals - rest - 10k easy - rest - 80 minutes easy
Enjoy your running!
No comments:
Post a Comment