It basically turns into a race. So you'd need extra recovery after and it'll cost you one of your race efforts for the season. Doing it once you'll be fine, but more than that and you'll peak too early and burn out.
Threshold pace is the long term development that you keep getting better from, training that pace makes your body get better and better at clearing lactic acid from your muscles. Running faster than that will get you race-ready for shorter distances with temporary short-term gains that won't keep stacking on themselves. That's why in general it's good to do threshold work for most of the year and you only do a lot of the faster race-specific things in the part of season that you're trying to run really fast. So if your coach is having you do short crazy fast paced workouts in February/March when you're trying to run fast in May/June your coach should reevaluate their training approach.
What if I never do race specific work but keep stacking easy/tempo/threshold? Is it possible to train yourself to say 14 min 5K this way
Last year I was working with a coach who gave me heart rate training zones to run threshold at. I made the mistake of thinking that I needed to run to a specific heart rate without listening to my body. It turned out I was running threshold too fast for what my body could handle. At first I noticed a bump in my fitness, so I worked harder. Then I began to get tired a lot, and eventually I was constantly fatigued. I couldn't run "threshold" at the paces I used to be able to hit easily. I ran a 5000 on the track track and had a disappointing performance. It turned out I had overtrained and needed to take weeks off to let my body fully reset.
Threshold pace is the long term development that you keep getting better from, training that pace makes your body get better and better at clearing lactic acid from your muscles. Running faster than that will get you race-ready for shorter distances with temporary short-term gains that won't keep stacking on themselves. That's why in general it's good to do threshold work for most of the year and you only do a lot of the faster race-specific things in the part of season that you're trying to run really fast. So if your coach is having you do short crazy fast paced workouts in February/March when you're trying to run fast in May/June your coach should reevaluate their training approach.
What if I never do race specific work but keep stacking easy/tempo/threshold? Is it possible to train yourself to say 14 min 5K this way
Yes it is. This assumes you're lifting weights and doing plyos and some strides before/after threshold workouts or a hill workout every now and then. But you don't need to do any 200m or 400m fast repeats to run sub 14. Just get a super strong engine and you'll get there. A ton of people can run a 400m in 67 seconds, the issue is putting together 12 of them. Speed isn't the issue, running a ton of threshold work will get you there.
Speed starts to be an important factor when you're strong enough to hang with about anyone in a distance race, but you need that top speed to close fast at the end of tactical races.
Is 8x 1k at 10k or 8x 1k at threshold (half marathon) a bigger stimulus (same rest)? Which is harder in your body? You’ll adapt from running too fast but can burn out
In all seriousness, it’s like taking your easy runs too fast (but maybe worse). The gains to energy cost ratio gets thrown out of balance. You can rack up a lot of cumulative fatigue during a session that has you running 4, 6 maybe even 8 miles of volume. The idea with threshold is to be running the bare minimum effort to stimulate the right energy systems. Running 5 miles and sitting around ~85% max heart rate will help you improve your lactate threshold and general running economy, so will running 5 miles at around ~92% max heart rate. The difference is that one will probably take 24-48 hours for your body to recover from, and one will take 48-72 hours with added mental and CNS and fatigue (which can both be hard to recover from without taking time off if the fatigue is excessive) .
It’s definitely not the end of the world if a tempo run is ran faster than threshold effort, it can probably serve to push the needle forward from time to time. If you do it every tempo day, especially if you’re carrying the workout hero tendencies to other aspects of training, you’re going to end up burnt out or injured.
I’ve had teammates that would run their 20-25 minute tempo runs at 5:20-5:30 pace, and then run their 8k at 5:20 pace 3 days later. I have a hard time thinking they didn’t leave a good bit of their 8k performance in the tempo run.
Threshold pace is the long term development that you keep getting better from, training that pace makes your body get better and better at clearing lactic acid from your muscles. Running faster than that will get you race-ready for shorter distances with temporary short-term gains that won't keep stacking on themselves. That's why in general it's good to do threshold work for most of the year and you only do a lot of the faster race-specific things in the part of season that you're trying to run really fast. So if your coach is having you do short crazy fast paced workouts in February/March when you're trying to run fast in May/June your coach should reevaluate their training approach.
What if I never do race specific work but keep stacking easy/tempo/threshold? Is it possible to train yourself to say 14 min 5K this way
What is the difference between tempo and threshold?
What if I never do race specific work but keep stacking easy/tempo/threshold? Is it possible to train yourself to say 14 min 5K this way
What is the difference between tempo and threshold?
Tempo is a more general pace, often considered even slower than threshold. Threshold is lactic threshold which is the pace that your body clears lactic acid at about the same rate it gets created. I consider tempo more like marathon pace or marathon pace + 15 seconds. Threshold is generally 10k to half marathon pace depending how fast you are
What happened to me: I peaked way too early, stagnated, and simply didn't develop in the long term. Especially if I was doing more (faster) workouts per week. My long-standing mistake.
If you run your threshold too fast, then you raise the threshold.
And if you think that's good, watch out. Now all your threshold runs are gonna be a lot harder. If you're not careful, you'll raise the threshold to a level you can barely ever do.
In all seriousness, it’s like taking your easy runs too fast (but maybe worse). The gains to energy cost ratio gets thrown out of balance. You can rack up a lot of cumulative fatigue during a session that has you running 4, 6 maybe even 8 miles of volume. The idea with threshold is to be running the bare minimum effort to stimulate the right energy systems. Running 5 miles and sitting around ~85% max heart rate will help you improve your lactate threshold and general running economy, so will running 5 miles at around ~92% max heart rate. The difference is that one will probably take 24-48 hours for your body to recover from, and one will take 48-72 hours with added mental and CNS and fatigue (which can both be hard to recover from without taking time off if the fatigue is excessive) .
It’s definitely not the end of the world if a tempo run is ran faster than threshold effort, it can probably serve to push the needle forward from time to time. If you do it every tempo day, especially if you’re carrying the workout hero tendencies to other aspects of training, you’re going to end up burnt out or injured.
I’ve had teammates that would run their 20-25 minute tempo runs at 5:20-5:30 pace, and then run their 8k at 5:20 pace 3 days later. I have a hard time thinking they didn’t leave a good bit of their 8k performance in the tempo run.
What short term and long term benefits do you think running faster than the threshold can offer?
This post was edited 12 minutes after it was posted.
I just saw a Jack Daniel’s reel on IG that answers this question. if you run past threshold you get more tired so won’t be able to hit the threshold on later reps. running too fast also gives you less time at threshold so water effort. that’s the gist of it, but of course he explained it way better.