Sprinting the straights, jogging the curves workout question

Yes, it works.

Zatopek ran his intervals by feel most of the time so, that could be why he viewed it as aerobic instead of anaerobic work when he did 100s.

I like the idea of 200m repeats better just because I like to change the distance of the jog recoveries on the fly and 200m is to measure from any place you start on the track.

Yes, I have done it pretty regularly, mainly as a timed fartlek workout. You can also do this on a soccer/football field, renaming it diagonals, but the sprint is slightly longer (corner flag to corner flag, and the rest is shorter (endzone).

I do a variation on diagonals and keep the figure 8 in the middle of the field so the diagonal and end zone are roughly the same distance.

I like to run 20/40's for an hour or so.

chances are that "100 meter curve" is really 116 meters, unless you're on an older track.

Lydiard used to recommend doing 50/60 sprint/float for a mile or two as a sharpening workout

asdfads wrote:

Lydiard used to recommend doing 50/60 sprint/float for a mile or two as a sharpening workout

I've done this one, as a sharpener in the last 2 weeks before a goal race, and it seemed to work nicely. Brutal during it, floods the legs with fatigue, but you bounce back quickly within a few days... faster than a typical interval workout. I only needed 5 laps to feel totally spent.

Straights & Curves have been around forever. Ive seen runners use them in the early part of the season, when coming back from an injury, and sometimes in season.

I dont see how it couldnt help you, it's basically a fartlek workout. It will keep you from doing yet another steady distance run, or going to the track and burning up an interval session.

asdfads wrote:

Lydiard used to recommend doing 50/60 sprint/float for a mile or two as a sharpening workout

This is absolutely correct. Lydiard was much more than just 100 miles per week during build-up phase.

His racing phase did include the above mentioned sprint/float designed to bring you quickly to a peak.

I believe Rod Dixon ran 8:34 doing this workout in 1974.

We used to do 50-50s in the late '70s (50m sprint; 50m recovery). I absolutely hated that workout and was always terrible at it. It breaks up your rhythm and I found it incredibly difficult to sustain the sprinting after more than a couple of laps. I remember reading years ago that Viren ran something like 13:40 for 5000m in a workout running 50-50s. Anybody recall that?

Henry Rono ran races like this - with very good results

Er... wrote:

I remember reading years ago that Viren ran something like 13:40 for 5000m in a workout running 50-50s. Anybody recall that?

It was around a grass field, so not accurate. Brendan Foster said he ran a sub 4 mile of 50/50s. It's not that hard to run close to your fastest, when barely easing off on the coasting, though questionable if that's the best way to run them.

I do a similar workout called the Billat 30-30. You run at mile race pace for 30 seconds and then jog at half that speed for 30 seconds. The goal is 17+ reps. I usually try for 24.

For me, this works out to about 135m run/65m jog, so I'm not running very much of the curves. I start a new rep at the 200m mark. When I train slower runners, we stretch out the time to 35/35 or whatever so they start a new rep each time at the 200m mark. I just have the faster runners go past the 200m start and double back to get their jogging distance in so they can start with the group at the end of the proscribed time.

Why is the time proscribed? (heh)

More seriously: do you really have runners who are *slower* than 135m/30sec do this workout?