if you don't put 99%+ in, how are you going to get better?
99%+ of users on this site has read jakob's definitive guy to running and knows that running slow intervals but in huge quantities is superior to hammering out hard intervals but requiring massive amounts of rest. double thresholds are easier and more effective than race pace workouts.
And at the end of the day, how much more work do you think he could do? Think he has another 2k left in him or is he pretty much maxed out? I am going closer to maxed out. Is like 60mins of threshold better than doing 15 Mins of vo2? To some extent yep. But we are still talking hard workouts without a ton left.
that gap between going hard and racing gets pretty fine. Doing 4x1 mile at 5k pace is a hard workout. Try doing them 5s faster and you make it a race level for most people…
even youngins need to know. Your teammates who are fast despite hammering 100% all the time? They're going to plateau or get injured soon, OR they're B.S.ing and other don't realize that their 100% is actually not 100%, or they're trying to mislead you.
Chances are also, athletes faster than you in high school are doing a multitude of different things to be that fast, some are just engrained habits, some are thighs their coach or family have them do
For years, I would get in shape really quickly. Just as quickly plateau, and then get worse.
I definitely ran my interval sessions too hard - basically race-type efforts - and would always say that I was too tired to manage much mileage (I didn't run much more than 50 per week, with an hour 'long' run, although I was generally only racing from 800m to 5000m).
That would have been in the 80s.
Thinking back it gave me good anaerobic power (I could blast the last 400m), but I had poor cruising speed because I was aerobically underdeveloped. I actually could run a faster mile with three steady laps and a fast last lap then I could at even pace.