3 x 3 miles at Half marathon pace with 2 min rest.

justsomeoldcoach wrote:

Your workouts are not what you think they are. 6x1 mile at 10k pace with big recoveries is a half assed vo2max session NOT CRUISE. Look into Daniels' stuff, might give you some light on the subject.

If you really were "just some old coach", you'd know that Bill Squires (who coached his fair share of hard workers and wrote a book too) doesn't advocate excessively short recovery. Things like mile repeats with no less than 3 min. of recovery. I cited standard 10K-marathon workouts, and as someone else recommended too-- if you're going to do 3 x 3 min. at HM effort, do it with ~4 min. of recovery, not 2 min..

I don't know if the whole short recovery with big volume is some sort of new phenonemon, but maybe it's why American male marathoners are struggling nowadays. There was nothing "excessive" about Bill Rodgers workouts-- he raced a lot, did big mileage, and did modest workouts (like what I cited).

Edit: 3 x 3 mi. (not min.).

MJ12 wrote:

I heard this was a good half marathon workout 4 weeks out from the race.

Any suggestion from anyone who's done this workout?

It's a great HM workout 4 weeks out, and a great marathon workout 8 weeks out.

Take the recovery time that you need. Three mile reps are long enough that you don't need to shorten your recovery to ensure you get the right stimulus.

If you're used to hard track workouts for shorter stuff, then resist the urge to crush it on the last rep. Pushing too hard at the end is what will make this workout counterproductively difficult. The real challenge here is in the middle of your second rep. The end will feel easy.

Last night I did 4 x 2 miles at half mar pace with 3 minutes rest it was tough but completely doable.

Probably I should have used less rest, in retrospect.

I'm one of those guys with a lot of miles in his legs and who is pretty comfortable with HM pace so it was manageable.

but I can see how some people could get into trouble with that one.

Bump. Running a half in 3.5 weeks and I did 3 x 5k with 800m jogging recovery on the track this morning. Wanted to run the first mile of the first rep a touch slow, lock into goal pace for the next seven miles, then close the last mile hard. Ended up falling off the pace a bit on the last rep, actual splits were 16:48, 16:40, 16:48. My goal is sub-1:10, does this seem realistic with a taper? Running 65-70 mpw right now, recent race results are 26:17 for a hilly five miler, 15:35 track 5k, and a 4:30 mile last week.

One other question, I'm running a ten miler two weeks before the half, but I figured that racing it all out wouldn't be smart. I was thinking about running the first couple miles at marathon pace, and progressing down to goal half pace, good idea?

How did you do?

The Half Marathon Reality Check is actually pretty close to this: 3x4K at race pace with 1K easy between.

I do it with 2k rest, not 2min, and make sure the volume ends up around 25k with warmup and cooldown. its not a race, its a workout.