Pick up Your Pace August 19, 2008
Know when to take your track work up a notch.
By Ed Eyestone, Runner's World August, 2008
Just because you finish your intervals without dry heaving doesn't mean you should jack up your pace right away. Speeding up too much too soon can be a recipe for disaster. Knowing when and how to pick up the pace will help you meet your goals come race day.
When you boost the intensity of your training, over time your muscles learn to endure more and difficult workouts feel easier. The body becomes more efficient at making energy and moving blood and oxygen to muscles where they're in demand. VO2 max improves and, voila, performance is elevated.
But how do you know when to speed up your intervals, repeats, or tempo runs? Here's a guide:
Give Yourself Time
Even if you're feeling great after workouts, allow three to four weeks before making substantial changes to the pace of your intervals. If you keep upping the tempo week after week without giving your body enough time to recover, you risk overtraining. Instead, enjoy the feeling of strength during these plateaus. If workouts continue to feel easy over a period of a month or more, it's probably a sign that it's time to speed up the intervals. Be sure not to speed them up by more than one to two seconds per lap at a time. That may not sound like much, but it adds up over the distance. If you speed up by too much, you could end up crashing on the last interval.
Listen to Your Body
There are certain signs that will help you understand that you're ready to take your intervals up a notch. One indication is when you feel, at the end of your workouts, like you could still easily do one more interval. If at the end of the workout, you feel like you can't run another step, you've probably gone too far. You should be breathing hard, not gasping for air. You want to build in a buffer so that you don't burn out.
Monitor Recovery
When you're running intervals, you typically "recover" for half to the same amount of time of the interval (so three to six minutes of recovery for a six-minute interval). If you are able to recover more quickly than that on the last intervals, it's time to pick up the pace. That means your cardiovascular system has adapted to the new intensity and is ready for additional work.
If you train with a heart-rate monitor, you can use a formula to gauge this. Your recovery heart rate is roughly halfway between your maximum and resting heart rates; if you reach it before your recovery period is over, you can speed up your intervals next time out. So, for example, if your maximum heart rate is 170 beats per minute and your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute, step up the tempo if you reach 115 before your recovery period is over.
Mix It Up
And remember, pace is just one factor you can adjust to boost stamina; adding more repeats at the same pace or shortening recovery between intervals can also help. Don't adjust more than one factor at a time, though. Too much change all at once could be a one-way ticket to injury.
Ed Eyestone, an exercise physiologist and two-time Olympic marathoner, is the men's cross-country coach at Brigham Young University.