Tempo Running

It is important to cover all training zones in your running and one of the key ones that people often get wrong is tempo/threshold or stamina.  This is the zone where your blood lactate is just starting to raise.  Your heart rate is likely to be around 82-92%, the pace is 30k to 8k pace. breathing is fast but under control.  Best described as Comfortably hard.

Training in this zone improves your bodies ability to shuttle lactate and pushes your lactate threshold to a faster pace.  This is key to improving your race performance from 5k to marathon which is why tempo training is so important to include in your training and get right.  Training at a faster pace will not bring greater fitness benefits.  Running faster will mean that your muscles accumulate lactate too fast, you can’t run for as long and the muscles can’t adapt to clear it faster, and running slower means that there is little lactate to be cleared.  Prolonging the time at tempo is the key to improvement.

The pace used for these type of runs will vary depending on the length and purpose of the workout.  I use tempo to generally mean a run at the pace you ran run for 60min and give other paces by the race distance e.g. HM.  The key is to keep the run comfortably hard right to the end and not be tempted to speed up at the end or start too quickly.  Steve Magness (thescienceofrunning.com) suggests being able to say “I feel good, I feel great.  I want to communicate.”  with only the end of the final sentence feeling the need to breath.

There are various ways you can do tempo work and get the benefits and these are listed below:

1. The simplest way is a continuous run of 15-40min at tempo pace.  A warm up jog is required and the run should be at an even effort all the way through.
2. Split tempo- you can build up the time you spend at tempo by splitting the total time up with short recoveries between.  A good guide for the recovery jogs is 1min for every 5min at tempo, so a 30min tempo run could be split as 3x10min (2min jog) or 15min (3min), 10min (2min) 5min.  It is not so important how you split the tempo time up.  What makes the difference is the total time spent at the correct pace.
3. Alternating tempo- splitting the tempo work up further into small intervals of on/off running.  So an example would be (1 min@10k + 1min @MP)x12.  the important part of this session is not to run the off intervals too slowly.  This method of tempo running is of most help to those that struggle to maintain a steady pace or effort, or would be a good session to run on a treadmill.
4. Short period of tempo running to complete a warm up for a speedy session or race, or afterwards to aid recovery.  This would be about 10min of tempo work, closer to HM effort.
5. Finally there is also a way to progress your tempo work to further enhance the lactate shuttling capability and that is to add some 20-60s bursts of slightly faster running in a tempo run.

Tempo work may also form part of a longer sessions like progression runs or mixed intervals.