Challenge Yourself With a Paced Run This Week
Have you already stepped out the door to take part in our running competition ? This April we’re going to look at the different types of workouts that runners do to show you that it doesn’t have to be one long, painful, tedious job. As we enter our second week, let’s take a look at my least favorite option (I promise it will get better from now on), tempo running .
Here’s the thing about many of the classic runner workouts: People have different ideas about how to define them. Last week, when I suggested the steps, there was a discussion in the comments about what exactly a step is , and whether we are talking about the same workout or a few slightly different ones. My advice: we do this for fun, so don’t worry about the details. If you find yourself on a team where your coach has a very specific idea of what a step is or exactly what pace it should be … well, listen to your coach. Yeah.
Anyway, what is tempo run? The basic idea is that you run at a fast pace, but not killer , for a while (for example, 10+ minutes, maybe even a few miles). The first question you must answer for yourself is: how fast is it? Several pointers:
- If you’ve run 10 km before (that’s 6.2 miles as much as possible), use that pace. Call it your 10K pace. The fast part of your pace run will be much shorter than your race, so it won’t bore you like a race. At this pace, you’ll run a mile or two, not all six.
- For more experienced runners, if you know how fast you could run if you kept running for an hour and then might fall and die at the end, use that pace. (If you complete a 10K run in about an hour, it should be the same as above.)
- If you have not run a 10K race, but you have covered the total distance in a different distance (for example, 5K or a mile), enter your race time into this calculator and look at the “Threshold” pace it recommends in “1 mile “.
- If you don’t have this data, use your intuition. Pick a pace that is faster than your lightest lightest runs, but that you can maintain for 10+ minutes without feeling too tired at the end.
If you are a beginner, you may have been running all your runs at a pace so far without even realizing it. If you can’t imagine that you will be faster than your easy runs, then they are not that easy, are they? Your challenge this week is to make a run that seems paced one day and a run that seems easier than the next.
When you imagine at what pace you are going to run, how will you do the workout? This is where coaches and training plans differ. Two popular approaches:
- Do a light warm-up (say 10 minutes), then do a mile or more at a pace. Cool down by doing some more light jogging.
- Do a light warm-up and then slowly increase your pace for the next mile or so. Once you pick up a fast pace, hold it in for a few minutes and then slowly slow down. (This is what Hal Higdon recommends in his workout plans; you can read more on his website if you’re interested in learning about this approach.)
Choose what you like or what you are more familiar with. The point is to run easy, then hard, and then easy again . This type of running challenges your body and mind in a different way than regular light running (more on that in our guide ) and is great to include in your schedule, say once a week or every couple of weeks.