5K prediction based on this workout

Or how about predict a 5k time for this workout run all alone in good conditions on a track

4x1600m in 4:55 with 60 seconds rest (in trainers), 4:00 recovery to put on XC spikes, 1600m in 4:34, 4:00 recovery, 1600m in 4:30

This person ran a 3:50 1500 a week ago

I predict around 14:15.

Well his VO2 max intervals will be more than 5 mins if he can't do it in 5.

If his interval pace is 5 mins what recovery is he getting there, even longer? Maybe its me but I could always hammer my race pace when I had rests in training

Do you reckon he is actually going to do this race?

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

What I think is, if his threshold pace is 5:30 then his V02 max intervals will be right around 5:00 and his race pace should be in between (probably 5:10 - 5:15 average pace). Threshold is usually run as a single run of 20 - 40 minutes and is the pace you could sustain for 60 minutes in a race situation, but can be run as "intervals" with very short recoveries (in this case the 1:00 ones).

V02 max intervals have longer recoveries, up to a maximum of recovery time equal to interval time. So the most recovery on a 5:00 mile interval he could have is 5:00, and more realistically would probably have between 2:00 and 3:00.

The problem is that threshold intervals can be run a bit faster than you would run a threshold run of 20 - 40 minutes. You might run your threshold intervals in 5:30, but run your threshold run at 5:40 or 5:45 pace.

If your real threshold is 5:40 it's enough of a difference that your interval pace should be slower than the 5:00 pace, maybe 5:10, and then your race pace would also be slower, maybe 5:20 or 5:25, which would put your 5km race time in the 16:30 to 16:50 range instead. That's why I said that my first prediction only made sense if he was running his threshold and it was at the correct pace for his fitness level.

Of course, he could be a 16:45 guy who's increasing intensity and running the correct paces to improve his 5km time by about 30 to 45 seconds.

I don't know if someone's actually going to run this race. To me it's just a hypothetical situation because the guy who asked the question never came back to fill in details.

It doesn't matter what you call it 5:30 pace is not 5:00 pace

Why is he running slower with a 1 min rest than without a rest in the race?

ukathleticscoach wrote:

It doesn't matter what you call it 5:30 pace is not 5:00 pace

Why is he running slower with a 1 min rest than without a rest in the race?

Because not every workout is about running race pace. 1 minute rest is hardly any at all.

I'd say if this guy was to race 5 miles right now, he could run about 27:00-27:30 (unless he was really hammering those 5:30 miles, which I doubt if he was only taking 1 min rest).

That's 5:24-5:30 pace for a 5 miler. Take that down to 5k and you get about 5:10 pace. . . 16:00ish.

Racing =/= training. Just because you get rest in a workout doesn't mean the intervals need to be faster than race pace.

Well if you are not doing the workout close to the maximum of you ability, or at least pushing it hard in my opinion then its going to be difficult to work out you race pace

But from your summary he can do 27.30 or faster in a race. But in training he can only manage 27.30 with 5 minutes rest. I know 1 min is not much rest for each rep but its a lot better than none

Neither of us know if he was doing the session all out our your pace session and as he has gone silent its difficult to know

It would be interesting to know his pb's (pr's) as we also really need to know his time for a mile or 1,500m to know how close 5:30 pace is to his maximum speed. I knew a lot of distance runners with great endurance who were great on a longer distance but they could only just break 5 mins for the and would struggle on the 5km which needed that extra speed

By the way when you say threshold pace do you mean lactate threshold or some other? Thanks

Yes, I mean lactate threshold.

If you're doing workouts "close to the maximum of your ability" or even "pushing it hard" all the time, you're only going to end up burnt out or injured (or both), unless you mean by your comment that you should do everything at your best training pace, which would mean "the maximum of your ability" within a given system - i.e. the maximum of your ability in a lactic threshold workout might be 5:45 per mile, and the maximum of your ability in an interval workout might be 3:20 per kilometer, or something along those lines.

Since workouts are done to target different systems and done at controlled paces designed to let you improve without overdoing it, you wouldn't do intervals at 400m pace when you're training for a 5km race, even though by some definitions that's "the maximum of your ability" if you're talking about speed.

Guess I'm just wondering what you meant?

So you're saying you can only do in a race what you have raced in practice?

If 27:30 is a RACE

then 27:30 with a rest every 5:30 is a TRAINING SESSION

do you seriously not know the difference? I pity the runners you coach.

No, I'm saying that is you run 27:30 with 5 minutes rest in training then you are not going to run 27:30 or faster in a race with no rest

If however, oldeagle (who by the way I managed to have a polite discussion with) is right in his assertion that this is a lactate threshhold session then that's different. As this session is set at a pace you can maintain for 45-60 minutes, then he could maybe do the above times

However, I doubt if a runner who has not done a 5km, knows what a lactate threshold session is! It seems to me they did this session to work out what they could do 5km in in which case they were pushing it a lot more than the threshold session

unless you mean by your comment that you should do everything at your best training pace, which would mean "the maximum of your ability" within a given system

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I meant this.ie going at the pace you can maintin for the ditance of the full session. However I would expect if you did 2 interval type training sessions per week you would be pushing it hard on these as you would have rest and easy days inbetween.

Looked into predictive sessions a bit more and apparently the pace in this session is a good indicator of pace for 5km. This is faster than my original at 3.1 x 5.30 = 17.05

It would be interesting to know what the guy actually did in the race or is it just a theoretical test?

ukathleticscoach wrote:

No, I'm saying that is you run 27:30 with 5 minutes rest in training then you are not going to run 27:30 or faster in a race with no rest

But that's exactly what I'm saying. In training, we mimic little bits of our race. However, in order for it to be TRAINING SESSION and not a RACE we take short bits of REST in between each bit.

I would say if you can do 5xmile in a given average with only one minute rest in between and you handle that reasonably well, then you are more than ready to handle that pace in a RACE.

I don't understand why this is so difficult. Not every training session is an all-out race intensity. In fact, most of them shouldn't be. So if you can run 5:30's with short rest in a not-maximum training intensity situation, then in a RACE which is a maximum effort situation, you should be able to do it without rest.

It sounds like if you're having your runners run all their sessions at the fastest speed they can maintain for the distance, then they're RACING their sessions. Can you honesty not see the difference?

I see what you mean.

My prediction was based on the Daniels VDOT chart, but it will likely be wrong because it's not supposed to work the way I used it (predicting a race pace based on workout paces) and I forgot to take that into account. The way it's supposed to work is you take a recent race time and that gives you the training paces you should be doing, but I took the workout pace and got a race pace from it instead.

A VDOT of 65 would give you a 5000m time of 15:54 and the corresponding training paces would be:

Lactic threshold: 3:26 km / 5:28 mile

Interval: 3:10 km / 3:48 (1200m)

Daniels doesn't assign mile intervals until you can run them in 5:00 or better at the proper pace, which is at 66 on the chart.

I was going by the assumption that this guy was somewhere between 64 and 65 (64 is a 16:07) based on this being a threshold workout (I personally think 5:00 is the most you should do for intervals at actual interval pace anyway, so I assumed he wasn't doing intervals with the 5:30 time).

Now that I think about it I can see that if this is a predictive workout like you thought, my calculation would have to be off by quite a bit. And even if it was a threshold workout the chart likely doesn't work the way I used it. And he could be training at a different pace than his racing capability if he doesn't have a race time to judge by (personal experience shows you can train up to 5 points higher on the VDOT than you're capable of racing, at least at that level; or maybe I just underperformed).

A 60 on the VDOT chart would put him at 17:03, which would be closer to your guess, and to me seems fairly realistic if it's a predictive workout instead of just a theshold set. I'd even put him at 17:30 or 17:45 if it was a race pace effort in the workout due to the lack of rest in a race.

I'd imagine the guy who started the thread forgot about it long ago, or is maybe watching and laughing to himself about the whole thing. It would be nice to see some followup so we could find out if we're going about this correctly or if we're completely off base.

Well I've moved my prediction down 30secs and yours has gone up a bit so we have agreed on a middle ground. I've definitely learnt a bit more about lactic threshold training from you and appreciate that.

Take what I've said about threshold with a grain of salt. I got most of it from Daniels' Running Formula, which is generally thought to be pretty accurate, but some of it was also my own interpretation based on personal experience, and might not turn out to be true (like when I said threshold intervals can end up being faster than an actual threshold run of 20 - 40 minutes, that was based on my experience when running with a group of guys who tend to go faster than they should for everything; we always tried to make sure we weren't crossing the threshold, but sometimes it was pretty close and I expect adding 10 seconds per mile would be more accurate to the pace we could hold for an hour).

Have you done or seen done workouts of the type you're describing (i.e. the total distance of the workout is 5000m, so the workout is run at your 5000m race - or goal? - pace with short recovery, to simulate a race to give you an idea of your fitness level)?

I've never really heard of it done other than for shorter distances, like the 400m all out, 1:00 rest, 400m all out, which was supposed to give you the time you could do an 800m race in when added up. For longer distances it tends to be time trials or an actual race in my experience, but that could just be the area I live in or the knowledge/experience of the coaches I've had. I know most things I've read have indicated it's best to keep race pace workouts to a minimum, like once per season. Would this be a start-of-season test to set a standard for the rest of the season's training?

Looked up Frank Horwill who coached Olympic 5km 4th placer:

http://www.serpentine.org.uk/pages/advice_frank58.html

The great forecaster of 5km times is 4 x 1,600m with 90 seconds recovery. If the average for the 1,600ms is taken, this will be the subsequent 5km pace. 4.10.5 average = 12min 55. 4.16 = 13 min 11. (This is what one of my athletes averaged when running 13 min 11 to come 4th in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic 5km); 4.20 = 13 min 30; 4.30 = 13 min 58

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I never did this session myself. Long time ago used to do 4 x 1,000m with 300m rest. I always found that I could go a lot faster in training than in the race, although that's with a longer than 1 min rest.

Once saw 3 Ethiopians (actually started the session with them - bad idea!) do 12 x 400m in 62/3 with 45 secs jog recovery. That was phemomenal to watch but even they couldn't hold that pace in a race - 13.10, they were actually running 13.40/50 that little bit of a rest seems to me to make a lot of difference.

I used to like running time trials over 2, 3 miles etc. This was mainly because I found it hard to do longer interval sessions on my own and just enjoyed going for my route best etc. They would give the most accurate prediction - but you might as well do a race!

To my mind all these predictions are pretty limited in usefulness. Set a training program then do a race that would be my plan. Whenever I set off with some preset idea of the pace I would run it would always go wrong. Once the race is underway, you get used to intuitively setting a pace you can hold for the distance

But suppose you haven't raced the distance in over a year and have no idea what your training paces should be. How would you set up a training plan in that case? I suppose that would be the best time to run a time trial or one of these predictive workouts so you can set a baseline for your subsequent training and race prep? Unless you've got athletes who are good judges of their own capabilities and training paces just naturally, I feel like that might be what I would do. I'm definitely not a coach though, so I'm not sure if it makes sense to do it that way as opposed to just letting the athletes figure out their paces on their own. I prefer to have a coach who will tell me what to do and why to do it. If I wanted to figure it out on my own, I wouldn't have a coach. I just get the feeling a lot of athletes would overdo the training or go harder than they should be in training (which is why I ended up training 5 points higher on the VDOT chart than my races said I should have been, I'm guessing). As for the threshold thing, I just grabbed this from another thread.http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?board=1&id=248888&thread=248888

Response to question regarding the use of long or short threshold runs for a 5k preparation:

16:00 current best for 5k = 5:09.6/mile

Training Paces for endurance development...

4.0 mmol = 5:33 /mile

3.0 mmol = 5:44

2.5 mmol = 5:56 or MP (Marathon Pace)

1.0 mmol = 6:53

Use the 4 mmol for shorter tempo runs, the 3 mmol for medium length tempo runs, the 2.5 mmol for long tempo-endurance runs, and the 1 mmol for aerobic maintenance and recovery distance runs.

As a rule-of-thumb, shorter tempo runs are 20-30 minutes long, medium length tempo runs are 40-60 minutes long, and long tempo runs are 70-80 minutes. 2.5 to 4.0 mmol is the range or zone for greatest endurance development for distance runners.

Shorter-Length Tempo Runs = 20-30 minutes

Medium-Length Tempo Runs = 40-60 minutes

Longer-Length Tempo Runs = 70-80 minutes

If the ideas in this are correct, then what I was saying about short threshold intervals tending to be faster than threshold runs might be pretty normal. Those values deal with 20 minutes minimum, but I'd imagine it could carry over to shorter (5:00 - 10:00 range) interval style threshold (tempo) runs with very short rests to a certain extent.

Also, the Kosmin Test mentioned in the link you posted was what I was thinking of with with 400m/1:00 rest/400m prediction workout.