A recent Thursday workout was a combination of fast intervals – 600, 400s, 200s. The first came in at 2min05. The 400s both pleasingly scraped under 1min20 while the 200s were a final gasping all-out effort to get on target. Arriving home the 400s and 600 were what stuck out in my mind because they were close to the times I used to clock when running round Poole Park cricket pitch. In fact, when I looked them up I discovered the workouts I did were exactly a decade ago. How times move on.
In September 2011, I wasn’t the committed runner I am now. My first six months of the year had only seen me bank less than two hundred miles but I could run a 21:30 parkrun. In July I started doing a proper warm-up which knocked over thirty seconds off taking me sub-21. I then entered New Forest half marathon for late September and this triggered my “train harder” instinct.
My belief about getting faster at running then was based around the same idea as most people – run faster in training. But, as a sports and exercise science graduate, I’d also read up on the ideas of increasing VO2max through hard interval training and Lactate Threshold through tempo runs and through Stephen Seiler’s MAPP website thought this was the way to train. It was unsophisticated stuff but to the untrained runner it has initial benefits.
I decided hard intervals, aiming for a 19-min parkrun pace, were the way forward. After all, if I wanted to run nineteen minutes I needed to train at the pace. It didn’t seem insurmountable as I’d run a 5:55 mile in the summer which is a similar pace.
I didn’t own a GPS watch but had a sportswatch to time my runs and used a heart-rate monitor. The watch could store some basic info with the lap button but I’d often simply commit numbers to memory and write them down when I got back to the office! I have many spreadsheets filled with this sort of data.
I found a website (Gmap-pedometer) which allowed me to measure distances and found a lap of the cricket pitch to be a third of a mile. Starting from a particular blue bin and running to the pavilion is 400m. I still use these measurements to this day.What I did next is some maths. I calculated with the cricket being about 530m, I’d need to run nine or ten laps to cover the 5,000m distance of a parkrun. Nine laps would fall short at 4,770m; ten would come in at 5,300m and ensure I had a little extra in the tank. With a 19-min parkrun being about six minutes per mile, each of these lap would need to be covered in two minutes, 400m in 1min30. I’d give myself one minute’s recovery between laps and push hard on the efforts. After all, if I could run them faster it must be better and lead to improvement?
This was my plan for improving and it had worked for me on the rowing machine many years before. But there were two immediate flaws with what I did.
With my then-parkrun pace at around 6:40/mile, I was asking a lot to jump down to running 6min/mile with nothing to bridge the gap. Certainly I was capable of the pace but to do ten intervals with only sixty seconds’ recovery was asking too much of myself. When I succeeded on the rower I’d been aiming a few seconds faster than my existing times. It’s why when I became a successful parkrunner six months later, and got my time down to nineteen minutes, it was because I only ran intervals at a few seconds faster than my existing parkrun pace.
I tried to cover the distance rather than do enough work to stimulate improvement. These days I’d wouldn’t do more than 3,200m worth of work at mile pace and around 1,600 – 2,400m is more usual. A full 5,000m is simply too much stress on the body to recover from. Think about it, when you train for a marathon, you only do a long run of 20-22 miles maximum. If you’re doing 10K training then the elites will only do 6-8K at race pace. It’s a mistake to believe just because the race distance is relatively short, you need to cover it in training.
The biggest flaw though is that, when I began doing these intervals ten years ago, I didn’t lack speed. As I wrote in filling in the gaps, you have to figure out what’s missing. My issue was endurance and lack of aerobic capacity. My parkruns improved three months later after I’d logged many easy miles with just the occasional fast parkrun thrown in. I already had the top end speed, it was the endurance base that was missing.
Pandemic over, a friend posted he’d taken part in his “first non-endurance race” in two years. I was stunned. This is someone who coaches and, as one of the faster runners, has others looking up to him.
My shock was because his race was a five miler and he’d taken over thirty minutes. That’s an event of endurance. Somewhere around 95% of the energy comes from aerobic sources. If you’re of a metric disposition, it’s a touch over 8K; lying somewhere between the 5K parkrun and 10K races.
I’m sure he referred to it as an event of non-endurance because it’s not a half-marathon or marathon which require a higher volume of training miles. I guess it’s partly because he’s regularly capable of running five or six miles in a training session that he thinks there’s no endurance involved.
But it reveals a huge misconception that many runners make because they don’t understand how important endurance is in distance racing. And by publicising his five mile race as non-endurance, he wasn’t pointing anyone to the correct ways to train.
Parkrun is an event of endurance but many think the fast pace of front runners is created by speed training. And to an extent it is. You have to be capable of running at five minutes per mile pace if you’re going to run a parkrun in sixteen minutes. You need some speed training to cover ground quickly.
But speed can only be sustained for 1-2 minutes before you begin to huff and puff. Running a bit slower than top end speed will allow you to last longer but it doesn’t actually build the body’s endurance mechanisms. I’m not going to go into the best ways to build endurance, but I guarantee running fast, gasping for breath and hoping to hang onto it is not the way to do it.
Deliberately building endurance is the key reason why so many people who’ve spent six months training for a marathon are stunned when they return to parkrun and run a PB. They can’t figure out how they can be faster through only doing slower miles.
But, for as long as people think of parkrun or the 10K as “non-endurance” it’s going to be impossible to reach their potential. By process of elimination, if they think of these distances as “non-endurance” then they will train for speed to get faster at them. It simply doesn’t work.
The closest events get to being “non-endurance” are the sprints (100m – 400m) which are trained for by concentrating on speed. Even then their coaches talk about speed endurance. Any event beyond the sprints, starting from the 800m, has a large aerobic component that is improved by working on endurance.
When I began parkrunning I was in my thirties. I’d never been a serious runner but my Saturday morning endeavours motivated me to get training and as I began my forties I started recording Personal Bests at all distances. As I approached forty-five I ran my first sub-40 10K. I was getting better with age.
Now as I move into the VM50-54 category at parkrun, I still believe there’s more to come. This is not to say that age doesn’t see a decline in your capabilities, only that I never fulfilled my potential when I was younger.
I’ve never believed the limitations of the human body are as pronounced as other people like to believe and in this five-part series of posts I’ll detail how fast older runners, both men and women, can be as they go up through the age categories and over different distances. I think you’ll be surprised to find out it’s much more than you can imagine.
There’s no doubt a fifty-something runner is not going to be capable of the times they could have achieved in their twenties, but there is a belief that this decline is rapid. It’s generally agreed athletes peak at around twenty-seven but it can be a couple of years either side. Becoming a world class athlete takes a decade of development and while the body finishes its growth by eighteen years old, there are still maturation processes going on within the brain and hormones that continue into the twenties.
Here’s a question to ponder for a moment …
If an athlete’s peak is twenty-seven and they begin to decline after this, at what age are they achieving the same standards as when they were seventeen? For example, if your parkrun PB at seventeen was twenty minutes and you continued training for the rest of your life hitting a lifetime best of fifteen minutes at twenty-seven; what is the age when you will last be able to record twenty minutes again?
I’ll give you the answer at the end of the article.
Ageing in sport is one of those myths that is slowly being deconstructed. In most professional sports, athletes are usually finished in their mid-30s with just the occasional highly skilled technician or specialist (think golfers, goalkeepers or quarterbacks) making it into their forties. I recall watching the Barcelona Olympics where Linford Christie became the oldest sprinter ever to win the Olympic Gold at the advanced age of 32!
In recent years we’ve seen athletes extending their careers into their late thirties despite professional sport now being played at a higher level than it was. In tennis we see Roger Federer and Serena Williams still near the top as they close in on forty; while sprinter Justin Gatlin won the World Championship in 2017 at age 35 and is still running sub-10 second 100 metres. Eliud Kipchoge just won his second Olympic marathon at 36.
As you’d expect these elite athletes are gradually losing their ability to compete at the top of their sports. I often meet runners who, having given up for twenty years or, never run when they were young, believe that because they’re older, the faster times are going to be beyond them. Now while well-trained elite runners are never going to be as fast as when they were younger, for those of us who start late, didn’t train or got poor coaching there’s every chance we can be faster and fitter than we’ve ever been before.
Within this series of articles I’m going to give you the facts and figures about what runners over the age of thirty-five are achieving. While you won’t necessarily be able to match them, what it should give you is a realistic view of how slow the decline is and how quick it’s possible to stay running well into what most people consider old age. I want you to come away from this series feeling inspired about what is possible. Whether you decide to get the best out of yourself is your choice, but age is not going to be an excuse if you don’t!
In part 2 I’ll examine the Masters sprinters (100m / 200m / 400m)
In part 3 It’s the turn of the middle-distance runners (800m / Mile / 3,000m)
In part 4 We’ll look at the long distances (5,000m / 10,000m / Marathon)
In part 5 I’ll give a brief overview of what’s happening as the body ages and what you can do to delay the effects
Answer to the quiz question – the old age equivalent of being seventeen is sixty-five years old. That’s right. Your physical maturity peaks at age twenty-seven but the decline is so gradual that over thirty years later you’re still capable of doing what you could at seventeen years old. This, of course, requires you to stay healthy and training.
In Is this sustainable? I quoted Chris Boardman talking about how it feels during a race. He said “There’s a constant calculation going on between … How far is it to go? How hard am I trying? Is this sustainable? And if the answer is yes [to the sustainable question], you’re not going hard enough. If the answer is no, it’s too late [because you’ve dropped time by not going harder] so you’re looking for maybe”. I was thinking about this as I ran parkrun and it occurred to me that how you respond to this question shows your level of mental toughness.
The difference between the mentally tough and the ordinary person is that the ordinary person gives up when they realise something isn’t sustainable. The mentally tough person doesn’t accept No for an answer. As I wrote in Denial, they dig in and try to gut it out. They’ll keep trying, hoping to find some kind of energy reserve – they may find it, they may not. In a race against opponents (especially mentally weak ones) not knowing your limitations can make the difference between winning and losing.
It’s fairly obvious that the mentally weak are happy to continue when the answer is Yes and they’ll give up for a No; but I’d venture that it’s the Maybe answer which is enough to get them shutting it down and giving up. As soon as the answer changes to “I’m not entirely sure this is sustainable” which Boardman says is the very thing you’re looking for; the doubt begins to creep in and they give up and fall back to a safe zone.
In recent years, theories of fatigue have moved on from it being caused by a build-up of waste products in the muscles; to being about the brain taking feedback about those build-ups and subconsciously allowing the athlete to keep going, or the mind tempting them to slow down by experiencing build-ups as pain. Therefore elite distance runners are beginning to add mental stress to training sessions to teach the brain, it can cope with more and it’s safe to continue going. You could liken it to walking up a street in the dark. The first time you do it, you’re tentative with each step because you don’t know what’s ahead. But if you repeat the experience and know you managed ten steps safely, you walk those steps quickly the second time.
If you can push through pain in training or races, it’ll give you an extra dimension to your running – it’ll teach your brain that it’s safe to release the unused reserves. This is the bit where mentally weak athletes have a disadvantage. If they aren’t willing to push through the pain, their brain isn’t going to feel safe to allow them to break into their reserves. I’ve met a good many runners who always play it safe. They start off slowly, start at the back of the field, or ease off when exhaustion or heavy breathing threaten. They don’t try to push through the temptation of giving up, they simply give up.
I believe the role of the mental side of running is overplayed in modern literature. No matter how much you want or desire to be the Olympic champion, you still have to train before you can get close to that stage. Physical limitations are still limitations to be addressed by training, not by thinking you can run harder. But, when Eliud Kipchoge ran the first two sub-2 hour marathon, it’s possible the knowledge of getting within twenty-five seconds on his first attempt was enough to help him find the extra seconds. That’s what mental toughness and training is about, having a confidence to push through Maybe and give it your all.
When the going gets tough, there’s probably more to be eked out than you realise. Pushing hard occasionally in training and races will help the mind know it’s possible.
The week I tweaked my hamstring I did two big workouts. It was all interval work and I was pushing hard, breathing hard and hitting paces I haven’t seen in a while. It was on the final effort of the second session, that I pumped my legs as hard as possible, hoping to end with a quick time, when the hamstring tightened and knotted.
The following day I ran a careful recovery run; the same again on the day after. The hamstring was already feeling 95% healed and offered no issues on the third day – a long Sunday run. I expected to run quicker than usual after two easy days but, while my legs didn’t feel tired, it wasn’t faster. My heart-rate barely went over 145bpm and although I had the energy, my legs just didn’t have the bounce or verve to go fast.
The next day was totally different. I went for my usual recovery run and my legs were full of power. Now I couldn’t slow down, it was the run I’d hoped to do the day before.
That’s the point of this opening: it had taken 4-6 days to recover from the workouts of the previous week. The hamstring tightening had been a sign I’d already done enough and once that recovered, it still took until the Monday for my legs to be ready to run like I’d hoped they would on the Sunday.
This is where many runners training falls apart – they push too hard, too often – they don’t let their bodies dictate the pace, particularly on their recovery or easy days. I know many runners who would have pushed hard on the Sunday and it would have delayed the recovery further.
A few years ago I became enamoured with doing 8-mile threshold runs. Start off with 15-mins of warm-up then push the pace up to the point where my breathing was on the edge of threshold and force it along for the better part of an hour. Warmdown, recover for two days then repeat the same session again later in the week. On paper, I was doing everything right. I was following the 80-20 rule, I was getting lots of recovery and so on.
For a couple of weeks, it went really well. My pace improved and I began to get faster. Then, on weeks 3 and 4 I saw no improvement. Around the same time my lower back began to tighten up. I went another week with the runs but the aches were increasing. It reached the point where they affected my day-to-day living and reluctantly I concluded I was going to have to back off the running until it subsided. So I went back to easy running and let my body dictate the pace rather than try to force things. Within two weeks everything eased up and I raced a decent 10K.
My experience is not uncommon among runners. At least in the sense that when they overdo things they start to tighten up and get aches and pains. This is the body’s reaction to trying to use muscles that haven’t recovered. It might be felt in the Achilles, it might be in the plantar, I’ve even had it in my shoulders! The only uncommon thing about my experience is that I didn’t whine and complain or put it down to bad luck or old age; I looked at my running and changed my training plan so I was able to train without pain.
This is why keeping recovery days genuinely easy is important, it gives muscles time to recover without putting extra stress in. Most runners are used to their legs aching the day after a run, they might even get some DOMS on the second and, after half and full marathons I’ve still been struggling on days three and four. They understand the need for recovery at those times because it’s obvious. But they rarely understand aches and pains in day-to-day living are general signs of needing recovery. It’s the aggregation of unrecovered muscles being called back into action too soon. Any time I have aches, pains or tightness, I know I’m going to have to back off my training. That doesn’t mean a rest day although it could. It may just be changing a workout to an easy run; it may be delaying it by a day, it may be cutting the workout down.
The moral of the story is muscles need recovery. The more effort you put in, combined with how much you do, dictates how long it’ll take to recover. It can take ten days to recover from a good speed workout. Old runner wisdom says it takes a month to recover from a marathon. While you don’t have to be perfectly fresh to train harder, you do need to listen to your body. Aches, pains and tightness that come from nowhere are always a sign that you’re pushing hard. If you continue to push hard they’ll get worse to the point where you’re forced to let them recover one way or another.
I’m now six weeks into the second time round with my 800m training. My first go-round, following a Jack Daniel’s plan, lasted from December to May and didn’t provide great results as my 800 time only improved from 2min58 to 2min53. But I knew I was running faster, felt fitter and hoped a second go-around would show better results.
This training block is full of intervals ranging from 200-600m in length. As you’ll see in the stats the vast majority are short with just four 600s planned. Last time I was aiming to run at 48sec/200m but later realised I should have been using 48½ which I could only just scrape on the 400s and 600s.
I’ve been working to 47sec/200m which is the training for a 2:52 800m. Trouble is, I’ve been averaging 43s for 200m, 1:31 for 400m and 2:15 for 600m. It seems like this reflects the discrepancy between my time trials and how I actually felt my fitness had been progressing.
More speed
Last time I tried to be accurate with my interval efforts – not going fast than necessary but always hitting target. This time I’ve thrown caution to the wind and allowed myself to run without holding back. That’s not to say I’ve gone all-out, I haven’t; just not held back.
Target time
On target
Missed
Efforts
Fastest
200m
47s
66
4
70
(14.0km)
37.9s
(5:05/mile)
400m
1min34
24
–
24
(9.6km)
1:26.83
(5:49/mile)
600m
2min21-22
3
–
3
(1.8km)
2:13.78
(5:59/mile)
Total
93
4
97
(25.4km)
Some interval stats for those who love them!
I’ve also introduced 8 strides of 10secs after my Friday morning recovery run. Ideally Jack would have me doing these on two of my recovery days but I didn’t want to undermine my aerobic base too much. Last time around, I didn’t do any; this time I’m doing one set. Next time around, if everything is going well, I’ll introduce the other day.
I suspect it’s (a lack of) this faster running that was holding my 800m time back in the past. I’m beginning to see my fastest pace come down from 5min/miling to 4:30/mile during strides and this may partly be down to the limitations of how quickly my GPS watch can produce an accurate pace.
Injury risk
The bigger danger is pushing too hard may lead to injury and it happened. I suffered a minor hamstring issue in week 5. It was the final 200 of a session that had already totalled 2,800m, and when I’m feeling good as I was, I tend to like to finish strongly; so I pumped my legs as hard as I could but felt a tightening in the right hamstring and it began to knot. I eased off, finished out the effort and jogged home.
I was fortunate to have this happen on the Thursday as it gave me five days to recover before my next set of intervals. I still ran on the days in between and by the Tuesday my legs were feeling great during the warm-up. I eased into the efforts but by the 4th 200 I was getting a sense I might not last. The next 400m I felt some tightening and on the next it was even more notable so I backed out and jogged home. That was last week and I missed the final day of intervals opting to keep runs easy and never push them along. I did a couple of strides on my Sunday long run and that seem to confirm the hammy is ok so I’ll resume training to the plan.
Long runs and mileage
The switch from a block of pure endurance work to repicking up speed work left the legs struggling on the general runs but it didn’t last past the first couple of weeks. But the introduction of the strides also sapped the legs going into the Sunday and so I haven’t seen much progress on their pace, they’re still around the same pace as last time around.
The six weeks of training I’ve done so far have resulted in 41.3, 45.1, 44.7, 45.7, 42.0, 43.8 miles.
Running form
Since April, I’ve been looking at how sprinters run and trying to apply some of their techniques and drills to my own running. The strides have been useful for this and I’ve particularly been focused on minimising hip rotation through better knee lift. I seem to be getting higher cadences on many runs and that’s going to be an important part of getting faster. The higher cadence corresponds with a concomitant rise in my glutes doing the work.
Once again I’ve really enjoyed this block of training. Getting out and running fast is fun especially as I’ve been finding it so easy to hit target. The hamstring injury is frustrating but I’m hoping that with the next phase of training being longer intervals at a slower pace that it’ll survive. I can run on it as long as I don’t overdo the forces going through it.
In the next phase, I’m meant to up my paces for fast efforts by a 1-sec/200m but, given I’ve been finding it so easy, I’m going to compromise by adding 2-secs so that I’ll actually be aiming for 45s per 200 which is what I’ve usually been running them at. This isn’t recommended as you should train at paces that relate to proven times and I haven’t actually run a 2:48 800 that would justify it.
Parkrun is also due to restart at the end of July and I’d like to attend. I’m not going to run hard every week but I’d like to see where I’m after all this training. I feel like I’m close to sub-20 form. It’ll mean dropping a workout, which isn’t ideal when you’re following a plan, but a fast parkrun will still have benefits.
But the priority is keeping the hamstring healthy.
The runner always had an excuse for why he’d struggled or failed. It was the heat, it was the new shoes, people getting in his way, asthma, a summer cold, anything but the way he trained or his attitude to racing. He never improved and year on year the excuses would keep coming eventually evolving into a simplistic one of getting older and more complicated, but unbreakable, ones like rheumatism or arthritis.
I’ve struggled for years to discern what the semantic difference between an excuse and an explanation is. When a runner tells you why they didn’t do well in the race or training session, an explanation can sound like an excuse, an excuse can sound like an explanation.
I believe the difference is in what you do with that information. By definition, an explanation explains what went wrong. It doesn’t necessarily place the blame here or there, it just observes events and tries to find reasons for poor performance. But an explanation can also provide reasons for a good performance. There’s a detached observation going on which can be used to improve performance next time around. It can take the explanations behind good performance and make them a regular, routine part of training. It can take the explanations behind poor performance and look for countermeasures, interventions and ways to address them so they won’t be problematic in the future.
Excuses though only ever relate to poor performance as a deflection of blame. They’re not there to find reasonable explanations which can be addressed, they’re there to protect ego. At their simplest they’re a denial of the facts and reality. It’s said with alcoholics and other addicts that the first step is admitting there’s a problem. If you’ve ever been around one of these types of people you’ll know how difficult, even impossible, it is to get them to accept the reality of the situation. Until they stop denying there’s a problem they can’t begin to look for ways to address it.
From all this you might think denial is a bad thing. For the most part it is. Yet when you play sport or race, being able to deny the circumstances can be a route to success. Charlie Spedding recounts in his autobiography how, prior to the Seoul Olympic he’d been injured and was struggling in training, but went on to finish 6th through sheer willpower. On the day, he denied his recent form and overachieved. But, it’s important to note, he didn’t use excuses during his training as a reason to give up; he kept training as best he could never making excuses. It was only on the day, he used denial as a short-term strategy to get the absolute best out of himself.
I realised on finishing the “How to Improve” series that I’ve spent the past twenty-five years trying to understand the principles of endurance. It was November 1995 when I bought a copy of John Douillard’s “Body, Mind and Sport” which made grandiose claims of being able to play sports effortlessly, run fast while barely getting out of breath and get ‘in the zone’ by retraining the body with nose-breathing and a heart-rate monitor. But it wasn’t purely a book about playing sports easily, it detailed a whole system for health based on your body-type and the ancient system of Ayurvedic medicine. The idea of getting ‘into the zone’ appealed because I wanted to settle my mind while playing volleyball and for a while I got strange glances from volleyball teammates as I warmed up with yoga Sun Salutes and nose-breathing.
I spent the following summer running half marathons as well as my first marathon, and in training used his method of nose-breathing and keeping my heart-rate low for some months. But all I did was tiptoe up and down the beach promenade at slow paces. The book had promised results of improvement in a matter of months with examples of Catherine Oxenberg running 8min/miles at 130HR after three months of retraining and Warren Wechsler running 6 min/miles averaging 124HR after 18-months of training. My reality is that even when I was capable of running sub-19 at parkrun, I’ve barely been quicker than nine minute miles at these heart-rates; I don’t have the physiology to allow me to do this easily. But back then it was a mystery to be solved and I was intrigued enough for many years afterwards to periodically return to the book’s wisdom and unsuccessfully try to get its methods to work for me. I didn’t realise it then, but this book was promoting the secrets of endurance training and the aerobic base.
John Douillard’s 1995 book
I had run before this. I’d run cross-country in PE lessons at school – I was terrible – I used to finish second to last, but I was also at the back of the sprints. I was the proverbial big slow kid. As a teenager I went orienteering with my friend Malcolm and his parents. The 5K courses took me 45-mins to complete albeit I was trying to navigate myself around difficult forest and moorland terrain. I dreaded the idea of running the longer courses that came with older age-groups and the thought of the 10Ks that the senior men ran terrified me. Eventually I stopped going when I got a job working Sundays at Broadstone sports centre, now The Junction, so the issue of going past 5K never reared its head.
But I always played sports and my bicycle was my main mode of transport so I had a reasonable level of fitness. Once I started fulltime work, I began to play sports with my colleagues and squash, basketball, 5-a-side football all gave me incidental running skills and fitness.
I entered my first 10K race in October 1992, ran 48 minutes and was into running for six months before shin splints were too painful to even walk across the beach. My training system was non-existent. Jump on the treadmill and run at 9.5mph for ten minutes gasping for breath. Run round the streets near home to complete a twenty-minute route as quickly as possible. No warmup, just hammer off down the road from the moment I started the stopwatch. Enter a 10K – train for it by going out and plodding the distance to make sure I could complete it. That was all there was. My highlight of those days was running 3 miles on the treadmill at its maximum speed of 10mph – 18min10 – it took the extra ten seconds to get up to full speed. I remember being awed by the fastest runners at work who could run 35-36 minutes for 10K. My 10K of 48-minutes put me two-thirds of the way down the results lists of races. Nothing about my life experience up to this point said I was any good at running. Even when I put some effort in, I finished in the lower half of the field far behind the best runners I knew, and far behind the winners.
Let’s break down the training for my early attempts to train for races. My training had three components – building speed, stamina-building runs and over-distance runs.
I built speed from playing sports which involved many shorts sprints. In a game of squash the court measures 9.75m from front to back, 6.4m across its width so you only take a maximum of five or six steps in one direction before pausing. Volleyball is movements of a few steps, but repeated powerful exertion when jumping to hit or block. The court where we played 5-a-side football and basketball was around twenty-five metres in length. That’s all I did lots of maximal paced sprints over short distances usually for 30 to 60 minutes at a time..
Stamina came from the runs of up to twenty minutes either on the treadmill (which was forcing the pace), or round the local streets where I’d start fast and hang on. These street runs also threw in hills and corners so it was never one-paced.
For over-distance runs, I jogged easily to ensure I could cover the race distance. My first block of running in 1992-93, I only entered 10Ks so I over-distanced to around eight miles. I remember getting from my standard four mile run up to eight was difficult. When I later did half marathons and even full marathons, it never felt as hard to increase the distance of runs past eight miles.
Even now when I analyse these, they’re effectively the three core types of training you get recommended to do. Although runners may talk about hill sessions or track speedwork they still fall into the first category of speed building. We might go out to do threshold or tempo runs but they categorise as stamina-building and finally long runs are categorised as over-distance runs. It’s very hard to discern what’s wrong with this training.
Yet I wasn’t able to go faster at any of my races. My 10K each came in around 48-mins while a quarter marathon (10.5K) came in at a similarly paced 50-mins. My half marathons came in 30-seconds either side of 1hr51. The most notable thing was breaking 1hr50 (1hr49min55) a couple of years later yet this is still in the same vicinity as the others. I always believed this would be as good as I got at running.
What I never tried to understand was why this wasn’t enough. I thought that to run fast, you had to train fast. That to get faster you had to keep going at top speed and hang on. It was only when I read Douillard that I began to learn there was a different way to train. But I tried it and it didn’t work for me because of how endurance is created. I continued to play other sports while trying to be a runner and those sports kept pushing down my endurance and taking me back to the speed that would be more appropriate to a sprinter. I now know it takes a couple of months for endurance to start showing up and even then you have to keep working at it and avoid overdoing the speed side too much. While my “train hard, play hard” mentality was great for playing team sports, it didn’t help my running.
I tried Douillard’s nose-breathing and low heart-rate method one more time in 2009 but again I found myself ambling along. Eventually I took off the shackles and began running regularly however I liked. Long distance running still wasn’t easy but I was getting out three to four times each week. I still had the stamina runs two or three times each week with 6K at lunchtime but – and this is the critical component – I no longer played team sports and thus did much less speed-building. Early in 2010, I ran a 10-mile race and surprised myself with a fast-finishing time of 1hr16. Three weeks later, I set a half marathon PB of 1hr38min30 – over ten minutes quicker than any I’d ever done before. Six months later I ran a 3hr41 marathon despite having missed a month of training due to a calf injury. I still hadn’t conquered endurance but I now realise less speed-building and more regular running were critical to the improvement.
The truth is, I still didn’t understand what endurance or aerobic bases were but I was running faster. When I got involved with parkrun and began running almost daily, it didn’t take much to see my times get even better. Sub-19 for parkrun, 41-mins for 10K, 1hr09 for 10-miles and 1hr31 for half-marathon in the first year. Eventually I began to see the low heart-rates Douillard had promised and my runs felt easy. But it took until 2017 for me to finally understand how to really create endurance and be running how Douillard had promised. The details are however, another story waiting to be told.
Today I’m going to tell you about my short-lived indoor rowing career. I used to spend my lunchtimes at the gym, warming up on the Concept2 rowing machine before I lifted weights. One day someone pointed out there was a leaderboard for how fast people could row 2,000m and, being my typical competitive self, I decided to give it a try and clocked something like 7min11 (the exact time is lost in the dusty corners of my memory).
I was informed by a friend, Gary, who happened to be a member of a rowing club, that getting under seven minutes is considered a good time. I don’t know whether that’s true because the world record is 5min35 and there was a tall, thin guy called Pete at the top of the leaderboard who’d rowed 6min30ish, but I was motivated to see if I could knock those eleven seconds off.
Now given this occurred around the turn of the millennium and the internet was still a new thing, I was very lucky to have access at my desk to the World Wide Web (as we called it then) and was able to research rowing training. After all it was more compelling than doing actual work!
The Concept2 Model C ergometer – an indoor rowinng mahine
I came across a website called Masters Athlete Physiology and Performance (MAPP) created by Dr Stephen Seiler which was fantastic in its detail on the effects of exercise on human anatomy and how rowers trained. Seiler was a Masters rower and a university academic who studied endurance sports. Although he had sections on cross-country skiing, running, cycling and swimming it was the Human Physiology and Rowing sections that I was most interested by. In particular he put forward a theory called “The Waves of Change” where he proposed how to develop as an endurance athlete.
First Wave is spent building VO2max – the ability of the heart to supply oxygen to the working muscles. VO2max can be fully developed in a year and is achieved through hard intervals and speedwork.
Second Wave is spent building Lactate Threshold – the ability of the muscles and surrounding tissues to extract and utilise the oxygen. This takes three to four years to completely develop and is achieved by running at a pace just below the LT to push it up.
Third Wave is spent improving Efficiency (aka Economy) and can carry on for years. Unfortunately no-one knew what training did this other than it appears to happen through repeated high volumes of training.
Having just completed my degree in Sports and Exercise Science this was fascinating stuff to me. I’d heard of VO2max before and even measured mine on a treadmill test during my second year studies but at that time, I wasn’t at all interested in the physiology. I was more interested in knowing my numbers.
With a concrete goal of breaking seven minutes, I lapped up the pages of Seiler’s website and I’d say it was the first time I ever tried to train systematically. I set myself up with a weekly programme of two hard interval sessions, two days where I rowed easy for recovery and then on a Friday evening an hour’s row at a significantly slower pace. I can tell you all the sitting led to a very numb bum!
It’s worth explaining at this point that 2,000m is the typical race distance for rowing at the Olympics and World Championships. Where runners tend to think in terms of 400m laps of the track, rowers work in 500m efforts and the Concept2 rowing machine displays paces and lap times against this distance. I calculated that if I wanted to break seven minutes for 2,000m then I needed to row 1:45/500m and this is what I set out to do on my intervals.
I began my hard intervals with eight efforts of 500m with 1-min recovery aiming for 1min45. I don’t know why I decided to do eight but the distance, recovery and pacing are all fairly explanatory. The other joy of the Concept2 was being able to programme this workout into it and having it show heart-rates alongside all the time, distance, pace, stroke-rate type information. I got into a habit of taking a pre-printed form with me to each session where, during the recovery, I would scrabble to pick up my pen and note down how long the effort had taken me and the starting and ending heart-rates. Looking back it was all rather nerdy and yet, these days a good GPS watch will do this for you and upload the data straight to Strava.
To begin with, I found my heart-rate would gradually creep higher and higher with each successive effort ending up somewhere in the high 180s. Meanwhile during the one minute recovery phase it would drop back to the 120-130s. So I’d row my 500m gasping for breath, watching heart-rate quickly ratchet up from 120 to 180 and then drop back to say 125 during the recovery. The next effort and recovery would see the same pattern. After seven intervals I’d be gasping for breath but go all-out on the last effort to simulate a final surge to the finishing line.
After a few weeks of this I began to find it getting easier so of course, I did what any competitive person would do and turned the screw. I changed from eight at 1:45 to four at 1:45 followed by 1:44, 1:43, 1:42 finishing all-out. A few weeks later I started doing four at 1:45, three at 1:40 then all-out. Next I started to reduce the recovery period as a minute seemed too long so I brought it down to 45 seconds and then, a few weeks later to 35-seconds.
I was certainly getting fitter. My stats showed I was covering the entire session in a shorter time both during the efforts and when you added in recovery time. I watched as the numbers on my spreadsheet gradually reduced.
Sample of my rowing spreadsheet from 2003. Not the original one from my sub-7 training schedule but equally nerdy!
But there was also a peculiarity I noticed. Where in the early days I’d been getting heart-rates up into the high 180s, by the final weeks it was impossible to reach this and I was only peaking in the high 170s. This occurred even though I was rowing faster with less time to recover. Even though I’d dropped the recovery time to only thirty-five seconds and my heart-rate only dipped below 160bpm, even on the hardest efforts it wouldn’t go up by much more than 15-20 beats. I was finding I could no longer work hard enough to get my heart-rate up to its max.
After two or three months of training I decided to have another go at the 2,000m time. I rested for a day or two and then went to the gym on a quiet evening intending to settle in for rowing at 1:45 with a fast finish to break the seven-minute barrier. The moment of truth had arrived. I began rowing. Immediately the pace was down to 1:40 and it felt easy. Far too easy but I couldn’t find a way to slow myself. I just hung in there as my breathing began to ratchet up while watching the distance count down. With about six hundred metres to go disaster struck. My right leg began to shake violently. I could barely push off for each stroke but I continued. The pace slowed and where I’d been on for a time of around 6min40, I limped through the final metres to a time of 6min51 and my goal achieved.
And that was it. For one reason and another I never had the dedication to indoor rowing again. But there was a side benefit. A couple of months afterwards I took part in a local 10K run. As always I started slowly clocking 8min15 for the first mile (for some reason the organisers used mile markers) and every mile afterwards came in at 7min15. An all-out surge to the finish line, gasping as I had done on the rower, and I’d set a new 10K PB of 45min50. Two minutes faster than I’d ever run before. I suspect had I warmed up and gone out hard from the beginning I would have run sub-45.
After this brief flirtation with indoor rowing, I returned to playing and coaching volleyball, took up golf and occasionally entered running races. Stephen Seiler’s Waves of Change theory stuck with me for the decade and I’d occasionally jump on the Concept2 and row hard intervals as a way to build VO2max as per his First Wave of Change. Then I’d run on the treadmill using an estimated Lactate Threshold pace to try and effect the Second Wave. Looking back it was never very successful because I wasn’t committed enough to running, but it did get me thinking about how to train systematically.
I occasionally revisited Stephen Seiler’s website until it went offline but his academic studies have since gone in a new direction and become highly important in the world of endurance training. It is his work with Norwegian cross-country skiers and cyclists that uncovered they train to the 80-20 rule with a Polarised training method.
A quick recap. Back in the parts on Frequency and Duration I recognised you can make quick gains off relatively little training. But once this stalls, you have to get more sophisticated and increase frequency and duration. My suggestion is to aim to run five times each week for 4-5 hours.
Once you up your frequency, there’s no way you can do all your runs at higher intensities and be able to stick to the schedule for more than a month or two. Eventually you wear yourself down and start taking days off or even getting injured. Some of the runs have to be done at very easy, comfortable paces to allow you to get back out the next day.
Research has shown elite runners do 80% of their running at easier paces with only 20% of their time spent on hard intervals or effort sessions. This is often referred to as 80-20 running or polarised training. Unfortunately the majority of amateurs are closer to 30-70 running with the vast majority of their runs being harder efforts and if you’re only interested in shorter events like the 1,500m or mile you may be able to get away with this. Modern training methods have shown that the longer the event, the more mileage you need to do to reach your best.
Simply calculated the 80-20 rule suggests if you’re going to run five days per week then four of them should be easy runs. In the article on intensity I discussed different ways to identify your easy-paced runs and whichever method you use, they have to feel genuinely easy, produce very little sweat, never get hard on breathing and your heart-rate should remain low if measured.
Most runners think training for speed is the way to get faster at distance running, but I suggest it’s about building your endurance to hang onto your speed. By this I mean, most runners could quickly train up to run at 5-minute mile pace for thirty seconds but few train to be able to hold onto that speed for a two hour marathon like Eliud Kipchoge. Building speed can be done quickly, endurance training takes years.
Where many runners fall down is to keep working at speed rather than endurance to get faster. They peak after a year or two of pushing runs hard, progress no further and believe they’ve reached their limit. The majority of amateurs only do 30% of their training at easy paces and training for speed is training time wasted which could be better used on aerobic development.
How YOU can train to improve
Begin by getting yourself running five times per week. Make one of those runs last 1½ hours – you might need to build up to this by adding five to ten minutes each week. If you’re doing all these runs at genuinely easy paces, I think you’ll be amazed by how easy it is to accumulate 4-5 hours’ worth of running. That it seems so easy may have you questioning what you’re getting out of these sessions and is a reason most people don’t stay with this training.
The first month is the hardest as the body gets used to doing more. It takes six weeks for the body to build each layer of fitness so it might take a while to start feeling comfortable. But within two months you should expect to feel better even if your times aren’t yet improving. What you’re doing in this period is preparing your body to go faster later.
I’ve often found within three to four weeks of starting this programme, my legs begin to perk up and are ready to run faster. Remember the 80-20 rule – you can afford to do one of your sessions faster. You could start to run a quicker parkrun or throw some speedwork in. Even just adding strides – picking up your pace for 10-20secs at 80-90% sprint – helps.
Progression isn’t always a straight line upwards. Day to day runs will fluctuate in pace and sometimes you might have a few days where the legs feel tired. I’ve often found this happens just before a notable improvement. Month on month you should see improvement in your general pace. If you don’t see progress, it’s almost certainly because you’re running your easy runs too fast, or more specifically not running them easy enough. When I struggle for progress going back to slower paces always solves all manner of ills.
There is a temptation once you get into this groove and things are progressing to do more speedwork or harder intensity sessions than one dose per week. Initially this will bring gains and you can quickly push the speed down by a minute per mile from two or three months of dedicated sessions and reduced easy running. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as you acknowledge it’s for a limited time. But the experience of elite runners is they ‘go off the cliff’ with too much speedwork. Even if you don’t, you’ll find your progress stalls and maxes out at some point. And likely, because you’ve slipped into getting quick gains from speedwork, you’ll forget that it was the 80-20 running that got you there.
The bigger the gap between your race pace and initial easy pace, the longer you’re going to have to stay with this training before you see improvements in your race times. You’ve got to close that gap to create the headspace to run faster.
How I trained to get faster
When I first began working towards sub-20 parkrun; I’d been running sporadically from January through September. I’d accumulated less than 500 miles of training – roughly 10-15 miles per week – on the way to a parkrun PB of 20min42 and running a 5min55 mile. This was classic low frequency, low duration, high intensity running getting me to decent times and putting me up the front of Poole parkrun in its early days.
From October to December I started training regularly with only a fast parkrun every fortnight and keeping all my other runs easy. I logged 400 miles and within two months I was running forty-three minute 10Ks where I’d never broken forty-five minutes before and my parkrun was on the cusp of twenty minutes.
I then started to run hard three times each week and while I initially knocked another minute off my parkrun PB to get close to nineteen minutes; I spent the rest of the year running fast, feeling great but never quite improving. It was only when I went back to a block of endurance almost a year later that I turned up to parkrun one day and unexpectedly banged out a sub-19 with ease.
Let’s recap for the final time. All elite runners train daily – that’s frequency. The duration and amount of running they do increases as the race distance increases. Elite 800m runners do at least forty miles per week but as much as eighty if they’re also racing in the 1,500m. The best 5,000m runners in the world are closer to 100mpw while those doing the marathon can peak at 150mpw.
Extremely high mileages aren’t necessary for ordinary runners but they do need to get out and build their endurance through easy running. Using time to measure your runs is a way of seeing the mileage naturally increase as you improve. When the body gets fitter, you’ll automatically know when you can do more.
The training pattern of elite runners, who do 80% of their training at easy levels of effort, is the route to improving in the long term. When you run genuinely easy four times out of five times every week, you begin to enjoy your running not dread it. It starts getting easier to get out for every run and motivate yourself to do so. You might even begin to look forward to the faster sessions each week that are key to reaching your top speeds eventually.
At any time you can throw in more workouts but only for a period of up to three months. The experience of elite athletes shows this is the maximum amount of time they can peak before going off the cliff and having to rebuild their base. It’s good to come back to periods of easy running which might not entail any effortful runs.
Recovery is paramount to making progress. The easy sessions should allow you to both train yet paradoxically to recover from the harder sessions. One of the reasons training hard multiple times in a week doesn’t work is because there’s too much to recover from. This often begins to show up as aches and pains, or even injuries. Most runners interpret this as a sign of ageing or their body not being strong enough but really it’s a sign they’ve been doing too much, too soon, too hard. Easing up usually resolves aches and pains in a matter of weeks without the expense of going to a physio or other specialist.
It all seems too simple but it works. Most runners are too impatient believing in the old mantras of “you have to train fast to race fast” and “no pain, no gain”. Undoubtedly there are times when you should push yourself but following a good diet of easy-paced daily runs will make a world of difference for many runners without taking up huge levels of time or commitment.
Big Red Running 