Track Workouts

HILLS, INTERVALS and TEMPO: Practice Fast to Get Fast

Training for a marathon, our goal is for the body to ADAPT to the STRESS (workouts) with improvement, but without injury or overtraining. Each workout has a SPECIFIC stress (movement, distance, speed or time) in order to produce a specific result. You can’t practice your baseball swing to complete a marathon! You need to walk or run, at the distance and pace needed for your goal! This is called specificity of training.

Put very simply, going faster will help you get faster and stronger, while making your easy paces feel easier. More particularly, it will help develop your muscles, connective tissue (bone, tendons, ligaments), nervous system (coordination), cardiovascular system (heart and blood vessels), energy systems (use of fuel by cells), mental fitness, and economy of movement.

1. If you are a novice runner or walker, or recovering from injury: you don’t NEED to do the“speed” workouts. It’s okay to just substitute the same total time and do an easy tomoderate walk or run.
2. If you are experienced, not injured, and looking to reach a new goal, stepping up yourtraining with hill / interval and tempo workouts (as well as being very consistent in doingyour weekly walk/runs) can help you improve.
3. “Effort” or hard days should never be back to back. This includes your long run/walk. If youneed to adjust your schedule, just make sure an easy or rest day goes between a Long day, Hill / Speed / Interval day, and Tempo day.

HILLS: often called “speedwork in disguise;” this gets you stronger (muscles, heart) with less stress on connective tissue from pounding. It’s a great chance to work on your form.
- Pick a moderate-grade hill; Warm up (WU) for 10 min (ideally on the way there); go uphill

moderately hard for 1-3 minutes; easy pace (jog for runners) on the way down; Repeat; Cool

down (CD) for the last 10 minutes.
- Sample: 45/hill = 10 WU + 25 min hill repeats + 10 CD. I find slightly less than half the “hill repeat” time is spent going uphill, say 12 min = 12 x 1min/ easy down; 8 x 90s; 6 x 2’; or 4 x 3’. Each week, you can increase how long you go uphill or increase the # of reps. Hint: I like going up for at least 90 seconds, which means fewer reps (and less counting).

- Alternately you can pick a hilly route, with about the same amount of up and down, and work the uphills, while relaxing on downhills.

- Note, we are focused on endurance and VO2 max improvement. There are many other types of hill workouts. Hill “sprints” are different: they work running economy, muscle fiber recruitment and form, but are quite demanding, and require full recovery (3-5x 10-20 sec sprint up / walk down). Downhill strides (e.g. 30s fast/ 2 min easy) train eccentric muscle contraction (work during lengthening) and are a powerful training stimulus, but can make your quads quite sore. I only use them if training specifically for a downhill race.

FARTLEK: “Speed Play” in Swedish; an unstructured blend of different paces (faster and slower). Typically, alternating an easy pace with moderately hard surges, with (almost) full recovery before the next surge. Fartleks can be done less formally, using landmarks (“go faster for 1 block” or “to the 2nd telephone pole”), or more formally with a watch (fast for 30 sec-3 min). Workouts in our schedule include: 30 fast /30 sec easy; 60/60sec, etc. Make sure to include a 10 minute warm up and cool down. You can be on mostly flat road/ sidewalk or at a track. The faster portion is NOT an all-out SPRINT! Think “moderately hard” or “surge” so you can sustain the same pace from the 1st surge to the last.

Whether walking or running, this is a fantastic time to think about your form (shoulders relaxed, arms swinging at 90-deg near your sides, hands not crossing over your center line, stance tall, gaze ahead, feet landing quietly under you without over-striding).