The underappreciated costs of running faster than one-mile race pace
How distance runners manage to rack up a high number of reps at almost all-out speed reveals both the benefits of such sessions and the foundation on which they're built
The following is an excerpt of a semi-random e-mail exchange I recently had with a long-retired professional track coach of some renown, with a few other coaches looking on. The two of us had successfully derailed a discussion on throwing events gamely started by another member of our small but diverse e-mail group; having quashed that minor revolution, we started pondering athletes who excel over an unusual range of distances. This segued into some jabber about running really fast in workouts by distance-runner (5,000m to marathon) standards, and whether and how doing an apparent overload of this could lead certain runners to improve more than others.
To some extent I’m reverse-engineering the excerpt, but the main questions ultimately motivating the direction of this conversation at my end are, why do some runners manage to excel, within the level of their potential, from the mile to the marathon? What is required in training of those born with the ability to do so? And what are the effects of different levels of intense training on runners born with different natural optimal racing ranges?
JJ: Some athletes are capable of operating well within extreme ranges. Which is not surprising, I suppose, but it is always exciting to hear of those outliers, especially to us dreamers who can’t operate well anywhere. I’m thinking of the sub-4 miler who can run sub 2:10 in the marathon—I think there have been a few, though I can’t think of any. A few decades ago, Lynn Jennings was biopsied at the NIKE Sports Research Lab by people who presumably knew their jobs. Her muscle fiber composition suggested that her best event would be the 800m. Lynn certainly did prove to be surprisingly fleet of foot at the end of races up to 10,000m.
KB: I've heard a lot about old-school biopsies—supposedly, Salazar was something like 98:2 Type I vs. the Type II fibers—but never one that showed such a dismal mismatch. Imagine going through one of those painful things and then getting bum info on top of it. They probably didn't validate parking, either.
Rod Dixon is my archetypal example of the sub-4:00/sub-2:10 guy (1:47.6, 3:53.62, 2:08:59 @ NYCM). Eliud Kipchoge is just so good that even though a 3:50.40 mile in c. 2004 spikes isn't nearly as impressive as 2:01:39 even with the help of "superflats," he ranks high in almost anything he tries.
Probably for reasons of testosterone (I know that doesn't narrow it down), it's been unusual to see this on the women's side. For example, the best 1,500m runners in the world are not the best marathoners or even the same competitors. I'm trying to imagine Joan Benoit or Catherine Ndereba racing Mary Tabb Decker Slaney over a mile in their respective primes. That may change when Hassan and Gidey run marathons, but I'm not confident their objective analysis of their bloodwork would reflect the kind of low-T and generally uncluttered profile I am getting at here.
JJ: Rod Dixon, there’s one. Maybe Galen Rupp, too. Eliud Kipchoge running 3:50 for a mile has me wondering about how much “speedwork” was involved with his 3:50 preparation, but maybe a reasonable amount since that mile may have been run at a younger age, before he got serious about the marathon, though I have no idea that that was the case. Rupp supposedly included 25 x 200 in 25 in his marathon preparation, which would have been faster than his 800m race pace, I’m sure. Plus, that sounds like an excessive amount of 200s to give him the leg strength/power (more than actual speed, I’m guessing) to run a marathon. Wouldn’t 12-15 x 200 at that pace done the job? Whatever the “job” was? I doubt that Alberto ever ran 25 x 200 at his 800 speed in his own marathon preparations, and I wonder what inspired him to make that workout part of Galen’s preparation. Actually, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe Galen’s 25x200 was in conjunction with his 5K-1K training, and unrelated to his marathon training. But it still seems like a lot of 200s.
KB: I was told a long time ago that even mile race pace should be considered taxing for "a distance runner," broadly speaking. That would make 800m pace more so by some presumably exponential factor (I make up math on demand, but that's probably the right idea).
It's a good thing people told me this, because I still might not think so otherwise. I mostly ran long road races, but when in shape if I were to do 12 x 200 @ 800m pace with a 200m jog, I didn't see it as taking a huge bite, maybe because I raced sparingly on the track. But it makes perfect sense that a speed a human can only hold for around two to four minutes places a considerable burden on the body when it's all over, even for someone accustomed to the pace in races and workouts. So despite Rupp being a superior athlete by any standard, 5000m of running at 800m race pace seems more experimental than something inductive reasoning would suggest works. And I think Salazar basically saw Rupp that way from the start—a hopeful experiment in how fast someone with great talent could become. That's the whole idea for everyone, but the stuff like repeat four-minute miles after his indoor races was unprecedented.
JJ: In 1959, the Spring of my senior year in HS, my coach had me doing 10 x 200 at a bit faster than my 800m race pace, with a 200m walk after each. This was my only serious “speed” training for the week, me being a very mediocre 4:40 miler. That is my only experience with volume 200s. I have no doubt that they helped me, but they also impressed upon me that I probably didn’t need to run 20 or 25 of them to derive pretty much the same value.
In one of the first of many curious twists of my life, I was being coached that year, by mail, by Fred Wilt in Indiana. I was in California. Fred was also giving me two threshold workouts per week (20 x 400, 90 sec., j100; 1 x 3 miles in 18 min.), though he didn’t call them that. (He didn’t call them anything, he just wrote the workout). Asking a 4:40 miler to run 90-second pace for 400s and for a steady 3 miles was pretty easy, actually slower than what we would term threshold pace now. So I ran my 400s 5-7 sec/400 faster, and dipped well into the 17s for my 3 mile. Still easy, but these “threshold” workouts helped me TREMENDOUSLY. Previously, I had been running 20x200 in the AM and the same 20 x 200 in the PM, probably close to mile race pace, j200, doing that EVERY DAY. I have no idea why. I had no previous direction, before I hooked up with Fred. Fred also told me to stop the morning workout altogether and stay in bed.
Years later, I encountered Brooks Johnson at Stanford telling his runners to run their fast reps with FULL recoveries, and Jack Daniels recommending 1:5 work “recovery ratios for reps of even mile race pace. (Jeff Atkinson once challenged Brooks’ dictum of “recover as long as you want” by asking, “Can I finish the last reps tomorrow?” to which Brooks answered, “Yes”.) Years later, I also came to realize the importance of the threshold training I had been doing in 1959. Fred Wilt was way ahead of the coaching curve in terms of his workouts, but trailing in recognizing the need for more than 24 hours recovery between hard sessions. (Though, to be fair, I’m not sure that Bowerman was there yet either, in 1959.)
You might wonder how I progressed in my senior year under Wilt. Short answer: I didn’t. I was only the 5th best miler in my school yet the 1st, 2nd or 3rd best high hurdler in the league depending on the day. My Spring track coach insisted that I divide my training time with the hurdles, and since the HHs was always the first event of the meet, I was always tight for any subsequent distance races. I ended 5th in the league in the mile that year, though, slower than 4:40, two teammates ahead of me, and other teammates off dominating the 800.
The rest of the story: I had a disappointing freshman year of miling at the U. of Colorado—no talent, poor coaching--but resurrected my hurdling chops by getting 2nd in the 1960 Rocky Mt. AAU meet in the 400H (behind Bill Toomey!).
After that, my running life got even more weird.
KB: I can come up with a couple of three-quarter-assed possibilities, which complement each other as long as the right kind of athlete is under consideration.
Galen Rupp is a one-off in a lot of ways, but still a human runner. Salazar had him from age 17. He was and is to the sport what the character Stebbins is in Stephen King's The Long Walk (which King authored as Richard Bachman): As close to a human high-performance, longitudinal, one-subject-and-thus-not-controlled lab experiment. Rupp might as well have had constant blood sampling as well as cameras on him continuously during those years, it seems.
By the time Rupp started all of those seemingly nutty workouts, he had been at the elite level for maybe 8 years. He had a lot of distance training under his belt. I guess that would make him better able to thrive on basic punishment, in terms Zatopek might have described it. [Note: Once or twice, Emil Zatopek may have done 50 times 400 meters in the morning and again in the evening. But as rough as that kind of day is no matter the speed of the reps, it’s likely Zatopek ran these slower than his threshold pace; it’s also worth considering that even with today’s tracks, shoes, and so on, Zatopek wouldn’t be especially good today, at the approximately level of a D-1 NCAA conference champion.] I base this mainly on my own experience of being able to bounce back from basically anything with aplomb when I was running 100-120 miles a week. But while I want to attribute this chiefly to the workload, I was also becoming a more complete runner the whole time, and like everyone else I can't rerun the self-experimentation. I do think that after an extended period of running a lot of miles over mostly soft, hilly terrain, and pushing when it feels right (and sometimes when it feels dumb), you'll be fitter and more prepared for anything if you get through that unscathed by illness, injury or fear or not racing well or often for a while.
Also, it seems plausible that a runner with a nice reservoir of underutilized Type IIa muscle fibers would gain the ability over time to both complete and benefit from a set of 25 200s at 800m pace, provided the rest and the speed are both precisely controlled and properly calibrated. Someone like Salazar himself, an aerobic monster, might have flagged badly trying such a thing. But maybe the fact that he hadn't made him even more eager to experiment with such sessions on his longtime number-one protege. And Rupp obviously has some real natural speed.
I also can't ignore the possibility that the recovery side might have involved elements not all runners have or should necessarily have access to. But if I go with "gray area," it doesn't really change all that much. I think.
What this all homes in on is that a runner with an ample proportion of Type IIa muscle fibers (“fast oxidative”) is more likely to excel over a wider range of distances, because these “intermediate” fibers are kind of like natural basketball forwards who can play either the center or the guard position given enough specific training, if never as well as a natural guard or center at the same overall talent level.
Some runners naturally possess a such preponderance of Type I (“slow oxidative”) and Type IIa fibers that they have little room in their muscles for Type II (“fast oxidative”) fibers. Such a runner is likely to excel primarily at, say, 5K and above. A runner with the converse endowment (a lot of Type IIa and IIb fibers, but few Type I fibers) is more naturally suited for, say, the 800 meters to the 10K, as someone starved of Type IIa fibers is, on this model, likely to be stuck running either the sprints or the very long distances, because such an athlete’s muscle fibers are dedicated to becoming maximally proficient at a narrower job.
The implications can become evident early in a runner’s career. If a high-school athlete who is clearly better at cross-country and the two-mile starts hammering away at a lot of short reps at or faster than 800-meter race pace, she may thrive if she has a high enough proportion of Type IIa fibers to complement whatever presumably low proportion of Type IIb fibers her muscles possess. But if she’s a natural 10K-to-marathon type, she may find herself so taxed by repeated bouts of increasingly futile super-fast reps that she has little left for races, both those at her natural distances and those she has in theory been training for.
The same stagnation may happen in reverse when a natural 800-meter-to-mile runner wants to take up the 10K or the marathon. If this runner has enough Type IIa fibers to go with his obvious preponderance of Type I fibers, he may find some success. But if it turns out he has relatively few Type IIa fibers, the shorter distances were probably his ideal bailiwick all along.
Perhaps the reason Rupp and Kipchoge have been phenomenal over such a range is their muscle-fiber distribution combined with the right training mixture of stressing their strengths while addressing their few weaknesses. Once a runner reaches a certain performance level, it becomes more obvious than it does to an everyday hack which distances appear worth exploiting and which are likely a no-go. That in turn makes it easier for an elite runner to figure out what to do.
And as “JJ” pointed out in a separate discussion, the idea of addressing weaknesses can be more than a waste of training time producing stagnation; in the case of an athlete with a very low proportion of the fibers being stressed, it can be overtly destructive. In JJ’s experience, a pure sprinter doing a ton of long slow distance will suffer much the same fate as a “pure” marathoner trying to become an 800-meter specialist—the central nervous system itself may be thrown out of whack, leading to all manner of downstream, often serious and lingering problems that elude identification by the athlete, his coaches. and often his medical team.
In any case, a runner needs to maximize her aerobic development if she wants to excel at her best event; that takes a lot of raw mileage, but how much if that is “slow,” how much is devoted to threshold running, and how much is allocated to faster-paced running becomes a guided experiment-of-one. As “JJ” notes:
The more (mileage) you do the more (mileage or workouts) you can do, and, moreover, the more you want to do. Your body starts to crave putting on its running shoes and heading out the door. Running becomes a kind of addiction because it makes you feel so good, so godly strong.