I wrote this article for our club newsletter last week but thought I’d post it up here with the idea of possibly starting a bit of a training tips section every so often. So whenever something of interest comes up at training or a training concept that captures everyone’s interest occurs I’ll aim to write something about it to give everyone the opportunity to better understand it.
The concept for my first training tips post is to do with pace setting. Within our club pacing is far from a new concept because a lot of our running sessions are often based around race pace efforts and simulating everyone’s expected race pace but all too often people underestimate it’s difficulty and in a similar sense it’s importance.
To set the scene for everyone; last Saturday morning’s main set was a set of 16x400m. These were done in sets of four with a descending time base through each four and the fourth one of each set was above race pace, while the rest of them should have been best average. While this is a bit of a mouthful to explain it seems to be a relatively tame main set in comparison to some of the torturous sets we’ve all put ourselves through over the years but it was surprising to see some peoples times differing by up to 15 seconds by the end of the session.
Firstly, there is no use in having a set pace that you want to run if it doesn’t have any significance. For most of us this should be our race pace or a realistic goal race pace that we are working towards. Everyone should be well aware of this time; be it the times they have run in races last season or the time they see as their projected race time for this season. This time will form the basis from which you work backwards to know what times you should be running whenever you hear the phrase, ‘race pace.’
Personally, I find it difficult not to have times going through my head and am constantly doing calculations to work out what pace I am running but for those of you who don’t fancy this train of thought I’ve done up a bit of a table that you will hopefully find useful.
400m time | 1km time | 5km time | 10km time |
1:10 | 2:54 | 14:30 | 29:00 |
1:15 | 3:07 | 15:35 | 31:10 |
1:20 | 3:19 | 16:35 | 33:10 |
1:25 | 3:32 | 17:40 | 35:20 |
1:30 | 3:45 | 18:45 | 37:30 |
1:35 | 3:57 | 19:45 | 39:30 |
1:40 | 4:09 | 20:45 | 41:30 |
1:45 | 4:22 | 21:50 | 43:40 |
1:50 | 4:35 | 22:55 | 45:50 |
1:55 | 4:47 | 23:55 | 47:50 |
2:00 | 5:00 | 25:00 | 50:00 |
Using the goal time you have set yourself from earlier and the table above you should be able to work out what kind of times you should be running for any race pace effort. Track is an excellent place to work on your pacing because you know exactly how far you are running and can look at your watch as often as you need to check your time.
In theory this is all very easy but being able to put all this into practice is a lot harder than it seems. I’ll be the first to admit that my pace setting has been way off the mark on more than one occasion and something that has taken a long time for me to have any idea of what I’m doing but it was really pleasing to look at the results from the half-marathon I did and see how consistent all of my 1km splits were. It’s not something anyone will pick up in one training session but if you know what your race pace is and the splits this converts to then you are on your way to more consistent running and all you have left to do is get out there and put it all into practice!
0 comments:
Post a Comment