If you're a regular runner but competitively rusty, how would you most likely screw up a race you entered tomorrow?

Regarding "fartlek" as a training motif instead of a stand-alone workout

After I ran a successful marathon in the spring of 2001 following a three-month period of training that foretold a positive result at every step, I naturally wondered what I had done differently, if anything, to help ensure this outcome at age 31 in my eighth 42.195K finish.

This kind of exercise is necessarily plagued by various sources of uncertainty. For one thing, even the most eager marathoner only has a handful of serious training cycles to compare. For another, a less-than-idea training cycle can produce a marathon personal best if someone’s basic fitness is simply better than it was a year or two earlier. And such comparisons ignore differences in race-day execution, which can serve to rescue a suboptimal training cycle to the extent this is possible, obliterate a perfect training cycle, or produce anything along the spectrum in between.

Right or wrong, I decided that the one factor that probably helped me the most was the variety of faster paces I experienced during the training cycle. While marathon-pace runs (sometimes within races) and tempo runs formed the meat of my training, I also did an aliquot of legitimate speed work. This was most often in the form of 200-meter or 400-meter repeats with the high-school runners I was coaching, but over the winter of 2000-2001, I also traveled an hour or so south to Boston on a handful of Saturday mornings to take part in the Boston University 3K and 1-mile mini-meets that were only a few years at the time and limited to these two events.

At most of these meets, I would run a 3K and then a heat of the mile. I would run the 3Ks in anywhere between 8:44 and 8:52 and the mile in low 4:30s. These are shitty times for someone aiming for 5:25 pace in a marathon, but I was usually in the middle of 100-mile-plus weeks, and 70-second 400s sustained for any length of time is extremely valuable work for a runner of this caliber.

In aiming to express the idea that even marathoners need to sprint sometimes, even if only occasionally, I formerly used the analogy of vaccines. I may even be able to uncover a written example of this. The basic idea is that you don’t need to do hard 200s or 400s or short track races often to maximize your potential as a long-distance runner, but you’d be unwise to go without or allow your children to do the same. Developments in public health in recent years have led me to shun this analogy in favor of something less tinged with morbid flair, but you get the idea.

The conviction that these factors had made this training cycle especially valuable, in part by happenstance—I never would have gotten up at 5 a.m. in zero-degree temps (in American units) and ridden or driven to those meets with my friend, fellow coach, and Central Mass Striders teammate Scott Clark soothingly convincing me these escapades were somehow not only wise but necessary—was the primary impetus for a article for the November 2003 issue of Running Times titled “Spice of Life: The Case for Multi-Pace Training.”

I funneled most of the pertinent ideas through the mind and mouth of Keith Dowling, whom I had met in the Korean Church of Greater Hopkinton, Massachusetts on the morning of April 15, 2002 as we both prepared to run that spring’s Boston Marathon. Dowling ran a career-best 2:13:28 that day, and some of what we discussed in the hours before the race led me to contact him for an interview that Running Times published in its November 2002 issue.

But I wasn’t done with Dowling. I had discovered that, like me, Dowling was inclined to study the training logs of runners at or above his level and look for patterns that might not be obvious, especially ones that ran counter to conventional training wisdom. Remember, this was before civilians had access to GPS watches and hence before the existence of Strava et al., meaning that digging up the training logs of elite runners, or anyone, took considerably more effort and ingenuity than it does today.

When I surveyed Dowling for my article about multi-pace training, he had this to say.

"I noticed most elite long-distance runners rarely followed a strictly periodized program like Lydiard. That’s when I realized that a mixture worked better. In fact, the earlier phase before Parkersburg seemed to work better because it included a little bit of everything."

Dowling was the substrate for the article, but if you read it, you’ll see that the theory comes primarily from a man named Frank Horwill, a proponent of what he called five-paced training. My perhaps overly enthusiastic propensity to seek useful mathematical patterns in odd corners of training and racing led me to seize on his ideas strongly.

Over the years, the concepts in this article, combined with ideas I learned from Pete Pfitzinger when he was coaching me in 2003 and 2004, developed into the 21-day rotating marathon training block that forms the basis of almost every training plan I now produce, even for non-marathoners.

I was thinking about this the other day while doing a Rosie-free run and cruising along a strip of road near the University of Colorado East Campus. While I have no connection to the university other than living very close to its properties, East Campus feels personal to me, because that’s where the C.U. track is, and the campus itself is dedicated to studying the things I did in my undergraduate days. A physics nerd who runs long distance could more happily live in a tent in the shadow of a solar-panel array than in one of the chaotic dorms yonder.

Whenever I pick up the pace to something that feels like a race pace for any distance, I have no real idea why. Apparently I like to run hard, or “fast,” a certain percentage of the time despite being extraordinarily reluctant to compete in a race or even a time trial. The simple fact is that my ego won’t allow me to accept six-minute pace as the challenging target for 10K it is (especially at this altitude) even though this is exactly what a 53-year-old with a musty personal best of 51 minutes and change for ten miles should expect to find challenging. I also see the world through a very jaundiced lens; as defensible as this may be, it does zilch for my or anyone’s motivation to test himself at optional tasks with potentially depressing results.

Still, my recent patterns when it comes to picking up the pace had me thinking of multi-pace training and not only why it seems to work, but why it is at some level intuitive. If I round a corner feeling good on an easy run and see an unexpected steep but obviously short hill, I’m likely to charge up it because no matter how it feels, it’ll be over in a minute. If, on the other hand, I’m on a long, flat strip of path and see someone who appears to be moving well, then I will lock into that pace and see if I can hold it for as long as I can keep the person in sight without following them into their living room (if I remember to stop on time).

Another thing I have mentioned doing that keeps my running feeling purposeful despite its overwhelming motif of maintenance-jogging is keeping my cadence at around 180 steps a minute no matter how slowly I’m running. If I wanted to, I should slop along at 160 or fewer steps a minute at 8:00 to 8:30 pace. But if I keep an honest rhythm throughout, then when I do decide to pick it up, my legs are already moving appropriately fast; I just need to open up my stride and decide how long I’m going to test myself for and at what stride length.

If I did decide to run an all-out 5K tomorrow, it would be ugly. I’m tempted to say that an unfamiliarity with the standard extortion of racing would present a problem, but I don’t think that’s true. I would most likely start out at too ambitious a pace and fade, but would fight hard for whatever grisly, soul-scorching result was waiting for me at the end, because I wouldn’t see myself as taking a lot of shots at a fast time over any distance. I think I would run into basic fitness problems—ones anyone could forestall by doing perhaps a half-dozen serious workouts over a one-month period.

I didn’t have this thought when I wrote the article, but the advice essentially translates to “Do fartlek, not occasionally but thematically.” As for why occasional but regular running at, say, one-mile race pace or faster is helpful even for marathon runners, maybe it’s a range-of-motion consideration; anyone who practices taking steps long enough to run 70-second 400s should have less trouble running 80-second 400s in a road race, ceteris paribus, than a similarly aerobically fit specimen who never opens up his stride and invites increases in efficiency, economy, or whatever quantity one wishes to assign to the process.

I do know that when you warm up or cool down with an elite runner, you’ll never catch them slowly shuffling along even though they easily could. I used to watch clips of former American mile record-holder Steve Scott training, and even though he’s around 6’ 1” and had a 3:47 to his credit, he would pitter-patter along at what looked like at least 180 steps a minute even at 7:00-per-mile pace.

Simply practicing high turnover while running easily won’t translate into being able to sleaze out of doing hard, regular workouts if you want to be worth a tin shit out there. But it does seem to make it easier to transition into the “spice of life” stuff that all runners should in some way aim for. It can be very tempting for fast, still-improving runners to become wed to a few signature workouts that fail to offer the kind of within-fast-pace variety that can help someone already doing well to make an unexpected performance jump.