was already a marathon runner, and most of my runs were long and slow. My cross-country conqueror took a different tack. He focused on hard 1,200m intervals, subjecting his muscles to the kind of stress he’d face in competition. At times he also ran 400m
of Medical Science for Sport and Exercise showed that speed at lactate threshold is the best physiological predictor of distance-running performance. Indeed, Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon champion was said to have had a modestly high VO2max
minutes and 2 x 10 minutes.All these sessions are at threshold intensity, governed by your heart rate. Start with a thorough warm-up and allow your heart rate to rise gradually in the first few minutes by adopting a sensible pace, so that you dont have
point, press the store button on your HRM (or tell your partner your rate)Speed increase should be about 2-3 seconds per 200m (or 0.5km/h on a treadmill)Keep going until you cant increase your paceJog gently afterwards to cool down graduallyPlot your
of champions is Toby Tanser. In 1995, when Tanser was an elite young track runner from Sweden, he trained with the Kenyans’ ‘A’ team for seven months. They ran classic tempos – a slow 15-minute warm-up, followed by at least 20 minutes at a challenging
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marathons. In 2002, Rosa had Tergat turn virtually every effort into a progression run, accelerating until he was running as hard as he could over the final mile. The result was a world record of 2:04:55 at the 2003 Berlin Marathon.McMillan found that making
lactate-threshold velocity also heightens race performances. For example, 10K race speed is about 2.5 per cent faster than lactate-threshold (LT) speed, so improvements in LT will force your 10K pace upwards. Enhancing economy also increases average race
be lower than 60 per cent. In my own laboratory weve measured heart rates at the lactate threshold ranging between 140 and 185 in a group of male athletes in their 20s; this ranged from 70 per cent to 90 per cent of their MHR. I suspect that the reason
. First, there's the 100kcal-per-mile expenditure: run 15 miles and you burn an impressive 1,500kcal. You may even burn more than 110kcal per mile, depending on the amount of oxygen you use while running and on your body weight. (It costs more oxygen
