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 don’t 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 can’t increase your paceJog gently afterwards to cool down graduallyPlot your

be lower than 60 per cent. In my own laboratory we’ve 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

’s somewhat inconvenient, here is an easy way to make a reasonably close guess: add 35-40 seconds per mile to your 5K race pace, or 15-25 seconds per mile to your 10K race pace.Then you need to train to raise your threshold. Try the following two training

consistent, you can easily predict your expected 10-mile race pace. It should be about 12-15 seconds per mile slower than your 10K speed, provided the terrain, wind and temperature on the course are similar to conditions you encountered in your 10Ks.3. If you

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

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

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