Breaking 60 for the quarter--slow person needs advice

All-out 150's or 200's on LONG rest. That alone should get you to sub 60 eventually.

Or near all-out. No straining to the point where your form breaks down. 95% effort is fine.

Initially include short hill repeats (50-80m) to build strength and proper mechanics.

Very helpful so far.... thanks.

As other posters wrote 200s at 95% are great. Also work on your traditional mile workouts. 8X 400 at mile pace, then 2 X 200 at goal 400 pace.

Hill sprints lasting 30 seconds all out. 4 X fast 30 second hills with full recovery, 10 min jog, 3 x 200 in 28 seconds.

I am actually interested in running my age in the 400 (59) this summer. My best was 55 age 44. Maybe we can compare progress here. I am also at "zero" in terms of speed, as I have just been trail running the last few years. This week I did 20 x100 (mostly at modest pace) with 2-4 min rest just to feel the track again. Today I did 14 miles easy, lol.

RacingtheCanteloupe wrote:

Problem is, I am now 30, and rarely do spadework below 5k race pace.

That's pretty fast when you have a shovel.

Even in high school, a 28 second quarter was almost an all-out sprint.

laughed MAO 10/10

What is your current training? High mileage without speed can interfere for slow people.

Reducing your weekly mileage, adding some power exercises, and doing strides after runs / hill sprints / miler or sprint workouts will significantly improve your 400.

30 is not that old. It may just take 2+ months instead of weeks to improve like you used to.

Certainly, you had 59 speed at one point and most likely you could have cracked 58, if you really worked at it.

Certainly, 30 isn't too old to get to 59.X even if you only had 59.0.

Certainly, starting by running 200s at mile pace will help.

The question is what is your current 5k and/or mile pace?

If you are still in 5:0X shape, this shouldn't take too long.

If you are in more like 18:30 shape for 5k, it could take a year.

Great advice here. The specific workout ideas are really useful. Thanks.

Yeah, the autocorrect of "spadework" was a killer autocorrect. Wonderful.

I am probably in 19:10-19:20 5k shape right now, coming off nasty colds my two year old brought home. I can get into 18:40 shape pretty quickly.

I am nowhere near 5:0x shape. That is part of my worry.

I will do a time trial next week in racing flats to see what my baseline is. If I come in somewhere in the 65-67 range, I think I will be OK, because I am so rusty right now. Any higher than that and I worry it'll be too much to drop.

I am a distance runner by background who ended up coaching HS track. Eventually, I coached sprinters and had to learn how they trained rather than just watered down distance training.

There are three things I suggest you incorporate into your training:

1. Work on sprint mechanics. A previous poster suggested running short hills. That is a very good idea and it will help you develop power as well. The hills only need to be 20-40 meters, however.

2. Get in the weight room. This will also help you develop power and explosiveness.

3. There is a system I learned that I've used to develop a lot of good 400m runners over the years. It is a series of 300m intervals/repeats that prepares the body for the rigors of the 400m race. It is an eight week progression:

Week 1: 6 x 300m at 70% of goal pace (58.5 seconds) starting once every six minutes

Week 2: 6 x 300m at 75% of goal pace (56.3 seconds) starting once every seven minutes

Week 3: 5 x 300m at 80% of goal pace (54 seconds) starting once every eight minutes

Week 4: 4 x 300m at 85% of goal pace (51.8 seconds) starting once every nine minutes

Week 5: 4 x 300m at 90% of goal pace (49.5 seconds) starting once every ten minutes

Week 6: 3 x 300m at 95% of goal pace (47.3 seconds) starting once every twelve minutes- this workout is actually the hardest one to do

Week 7 2 x 300m at 98% of goal pace (45.9 seconds) starting once every thirteen minutes

Week 8 2 x 300m at 100% of goal pace (45 seconds) starting once every fifteen minutes. Whatever you average for those two 300's is what you can do for 1 400m.

As part of your warm up before these workouts, do 2-4 x 100m at that day's goal pace. That will get your body ready and also help you make sure you don't go out too quickly for the first 100 of the 300.

The first 2-3 workouts will be fairly easy for you with a distance background. Don't get too excited if those workouts don't feel too hard. Weeks 5-6 will give you a really good gauge on how you are coming along. If you can hit week 6 on pace, you are in really good shape to hit your goal. Ideally, your 400m race should be about 7-10 days after your last workout. We used to do the week 8 workout a week and a half before regionals.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

You're going to want to develop max speed, speed endurance, and Lactic-acid tolerance. Generally, you can meet these respectively with short max-intensity efforts (e.g. uphill 30-50m), longer high-intensity efforts (e.g. 150-200m @80%+), and long high-intensity intervals (e.g. 300-500m @80%+)

Most importantly, don't neglect your drills and stretching. It's a lot easier to pull something at sprint intensity than it is in distance training. On that note, given your situation, I'd cut out the long stuff (3rd category) and substitute high-volume "threshold-ish" stuff (e.g. 20x200 @40-45s, with

"Distance to sprints", thanks for that post. That is a nice progression of workouts. From my experience as a 800/1500 guy years ago, when I time trialed 1x300 meters at 100% it was a great predictor of my 400; I imagine that 2x300 at that effort might be very difficult. I would be inclined to do this session as: 300/200/100 all at goal 400 pace, with 3 min recovery. I also will include a session on more pure (200m race) speed each week, using 100 repeats with good rest (3+ min).

Another great session I used was 10x100, rolling start w/3 min walkback @ goal 400 pace. Usually predicted 400 time as well (i.e. when in 56 or better shape averaged under 14 seconds). Again, I was an 800 runner at this point, so a true sprinter might be faster relative to PR.

I am in a similar situation as far as sprinting speed is concerned. 200 PR of 27.5, 400 59.5, 800 2:12, 5 K road down 1% grade at 4500 feet 15:37, 1:09:40 half dropping from 5800 feet to 4800 feet, 1:12:09 split in a sea-level marathon (Richmond), 2:23:57 marathon in St. George (2600 feet elevation drop), 2:30:32 on an honest sea-level course (St. Jude). I must add a disclaimer that I have not raced at sea level a whole lot and my best races in the marathon and the half marathon have happened on a downhill course at altitude.

I was able to run 59.5 at the age of 30, repeated the 200 PR from the age of 17 at the age of 30, and repeated my 18 year old 800 PR at the age of 37.

Over the course of the years I have tried to solve the mystery of low speed. A naive explanation was slow twitch fiber dominance, but I knew that was not everything because if it was the true slow twitch problem, the 800 would have been around 2:05, and 5000 around 14:30. Instead, even when I ran 90-100 miles a week, I was still slowing down from 400 to 5000 more like a middle distance runner with good endurance than a marathoner with no speed. Plus, I had a VO2 of 75.9 measured in a BYU lab which suggested a very poor running economy.

My form has always had an apparent awkwardness, but nobody has been able to coherently explain why. Different specialists made their guesses along the lines of some muscle being weak or tight. I would strengthen and or stretch that muscle greatly improving the strength and/or flexibility with no measurable results in running speed or economy. At the age of 39 I finally figured it out. An X-ray of my spine revealed spina bifida occulta in L-4 and L-5. This condition has been mostly asymptomatic for me as far as the general health is concerned - I did know if that if I ran too much around the track or a skewed surface, I would develop pain in the lower back, but otherwise I was OK - have been running now for 31 years with the longest break of 3 days, can handle 90-100 miles a week on asphalt no problem as long as it is straight. But this vertebral deformity, which affects around 10-20% of the population, is apparently enough to limit the top speed, as well as the running economy.

I have a strong suspicion that generally healthy male runners that try their best to improve their top speed but are stuck around the 60 second quarter barrier likely have something similar limiting them. If your form looks awkward, you feel glued to the ground, you can drop your competition on a downhill but they drop you on the uphill, your quads tend to overdevelop, 60 second quarter is a challenge, and in spite of solid endurance training you struggle to run a negative split in any race, it might be worthwhile to examine your spine for some pathology.

Unfortunately spinal deformities of this kind do not have a fix known to science today - from what I have been able to gather at least. It is my hope that an unexpected breakthrough in medicine might allow to insert something in the vertebra non-invasively enough so to actually improve your spine performance and allow you to run more competitively after the procedure or treatment. But for now your best bet is to keep the weight in a healthy range, maintain your overall health, train to preserve your endurance and muscle power, and keep the back and abdominal muscles strong so you can at least maintain your strength.

Yes! Thanks for posting this. I will try the workouts.

35 y.o. similar speed and training to you. Probs in 5:10 mile shape right now, but mainly a trail runner.

I know there were points in my life where I could have done it but never did. My goal is to get it before my next scheduled injury (aka baby #2).

My advice would be to focus on your form. I don't care how fit you are if your form isn't there you'll never be as fast as you want to be. If you don't have the knee drive, if you don't have good posture. If you start whipping your trail leg back. Any of these small things can have huge impacts on your "raw" speed. Fixing imperfections in your form will make the biggest difference moving forward.

Try some one leg balance drills. then focus on doing running drills like As and A exchange. A runs. Bounding all these things to improve your form.

Distance to sprints, this is an INSANELY useful post. Thank you.

Also, to the 2:30 marathon guy, I'm in a bit of a different boat. I'm just not that talented (and also don't have the mileage base you do). My half PR is 1:24. My issue with breaking 60 is not so much that I am pure slow-twitch and am an endurance monster, I just think 60s is reasonably close to my talent limit (I agree with another poster who probably said 58.X in HS was reasonable). My PR's align pretty closely across the board from 800 on up.

I know a 4:41 1600 and 16:15 5k runner who can't break 60 for 400m. Don't feel bad.

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