To say I’m a bit intimidated by the speedwork in my program would be a bit of an understatement…..
I did my first speedwork run last week, 12x400m. Uhm. That’s a lot of running, y’all.
Thankfully because I’m starting with advanced and then bumping down to the beginner program, I get another shot at the speedwork in a few weeks.
What I love about this program is the handy pace charts provided in the book. I’m certainly not going to share all of them with you, that wouldn’t be right, but this one is truly my favourite chart and I’ll be refering back to it a lot throughout my posts on this training plan, so it only made sense to include it here so you have some kind of idea what I’m talking about!
Since I’m running 50k and I’m not 100% sure what my finish time will be, I’ll be using the 4:00-4:15 marathon pacing to determine my splits.
I’m guessing I’ll be able to finish the 50k anywhere from 5:00-5:30, which seems reasonable to me. I also get an official 42.2km time as part of the race, so it would be nice to run the marathon faster than the 4:25 I did the BMO Okanagan marathon in.
Given the marathon pace of 4:00-4:15 this puts me at a 10k pace between 8:24-8:55/mile and a 5k pace between 8:03-8:33/mile. (I’ve handily converted these to pace per km as well: 5:13-5:32/km and 5:00-5:18/km).
Using the pace per mile and pace per km, this means a 10k time of 52:10-55:20 and a 5k time of 25:00-26:30 (I used this to calculate).
Now I move over to my 400m speed pace chart, using my 5k time to determine what my speedwork pace should be.
Now, I’m going to round down a bit on this to a 24:00 5k and complete the 400m intervals in 1:58/400m with a 400m recovery in between.
For the remainder of my speedwork I’ll be using the same theory to determine my 600m, 800m, 1000m, 1200m and 1600m paces. My recovery will also be the same distance as I ran. So for 600m, I’ll do a 600m recovery before starting the next interval and so on. I expect to be quite sweaty by the time I hit my 1600m repeats.
Tell me: How do you determine your pace for speedwork?
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I train at and do my speed work with the Peak Centre Vancouver. It all starts with a lactate analysis / fitness assessment that helps determine your ‘zones’ and where you should be training in terms of HR (for long runs) and pace (for speed work, as HR is less accurate at higher efforts). At the track each Wednesday, they then have somewhere there to yell at me and try to convince me that I should be hitting 1:14 for 400m, etc. which I can rarely do 😉
Btw, which 50k are you doing?
Wow! That’s awesome and intense 🙂
I’m running the Calgary Marathon 50k on June 1.
I use a bunch of different sources for my speedwork. Right now I am using the suggested paces/workouts for my training plan. I like to switch things up quite a bit so it doesn’t get boring. There’s so much out there to pick and choose from!
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