Are continuous tempo runs dead?

This is an example of the hardest stretch we do. This isnt all season. this type of work is past mid season. 2 weeks of something like this, a down week, then followed by 2 more weeks of similar right before end of season taper.. so 4 total weeks of work like this....this isnt all season long. your correct, they would all explode if this was continuous all season.

Just think how quick your guys could run if they werent fried all the time

From the walls of text and the mass of upvotes, this is an awfully masturbatory thread.

Obviously no continuous tempos are not dead. Echo chamber online forums and social media make it seem that way sometimes, but countless coaches all over the world always have and always will continue to swear by continuous tempos as a component of responsible productive training. Wide varieties of runners succeed in wide varieties of ways.

you literally have no idea what training plans anyone is doing (maybe besides Jakob, even then who knows). none of the plans are published so it's a pretty ridiculous claim that everyone is just doing cruise intervals all day. where are your sources?

if anything, tempo intervals are replacing more traditional vo2max intervals, not replacing continuous tempo runs.

CopperRunner wrote, in part:

"
If you can make yourself feel quite uncomfortable for 30-40 minutes at a time weekly..."

Jack Daniels describes tempo pace as "comfortably hard" and you are going for "quite uncomfortable" so you may be talking about different things.

Jack describes his T pace that way, but anyone who has ever run T pace knows there’s nothing comfortable about it.

Wait a second. Doesn’t Daniels prescribe a tempo as running 20 minutes of what one could race for an hour? Which means after completing a 20 minute tempo, one should feel like they could be able to keep going and repeat it two more times before complete exhaustion.

In a race - yes. Training is a completely different thing.

Great thread you have started Tempo Timmy. Another way of running threshold efforts that worked for me back in the day and what I use in coaching.

Back in early 90's reading the book by Coe/Martin I liked what I read and devised a broken threshold with a float effort in between. As I lived in the day before garmin and in an area where the best place to do threshold efforts was on the track the session comprised of 12 laps at threshold ie LT1 with a 1600m float in 6 minutes with the second 3200 at LT2 and then a 400 float so 10k in total. Early in the season I would run anywhere from 33 to mid 32 minutes for 10k but as my fitness progressed would lower it to around 31 minutes.

I use this now in my coaching and an example would be 3x3k at 3:20k pace with 1k float in between efforts so 12k in total but breaking up the efforts not with a complete rest but a 1k effort at 3:45k pace.

Just my experience with threshold/tempo running and shout out to 800 dude for his insightful posts.

Cheers

I don't understand why this post is getting such bad reviews. Many people think so. For El Guerrouj it was one of the most important training sessions (30-45 min of continuous running at 2:50-3:00 or 3:10/km) alongside the hard intervals. I don't think that exclusive training with broken up tempo runs is better for distances under 5000m, and certainly not for long distances. When I observe that 8x3min/1min slow jog is easier for me than 25min-30min continuous tempo, then I conclude that I'm not fit enough. That's why I'm starting with the continuous hard tempo runs again (30min is the goal, 5k pace + 20-25 sec per km).

In my own opinion, and even if some races of more than 2h are in my range, running expected race pace for half the distance of the race or running significantly slower pace for longer than race duration doesn't do a lot for my confidence. I've hit the wall enough to understand that when things go south, they go south very quickly in a distance event and feeling well at halfway isn't a proof the pace is correct.

If confidence is the goal, I'd rather break the tempo and manipulate the recovery portion's speed and duration to get confidence that if I've been guilty of overexcitement at the begining, I still can recover while moving a slower but somewhat decent pace anyway. That worked pretty well for me recently. That being said I'm not in a position to podium in anything but my age-group in some (not even all) obscure local short trail races, so I understand this strategy probably isn't optimal for very competitive circumstances and that adaptation to terrain and conditions is less important whn racing track or even flat road races where you probably should know more precisely what pace to race in the first place.

Continuous tempo runs, once a staple in many training programs, have seen a decline in popularity in some athletic circles. The rise of interval-based and high-intensity training methods has overshadowed these steady-state efforts, leading some to question their relevance. However, continuous tempo runs remain a valuable tool for endurance athletes.

Hello ChatGPT!

The downvotes are probably because this poster hasn't read the discussion.

(3 min/km for El G is LT1. The consensus is that LT1 tempos are alive and well, but LT2 tempos are dying.)

From Daniels 3rd edition: “Peaked and rested, you can race at T pace for about 60 minutes… When I have a runner who is relatively new to my style of coaching and she is doing a T-pace workout for the first time, I will suggest she ask herself during the run if that pace could be maintained for 30 or 40 minutes if necessary. If the answer to that question is ‘No’, then the pace must be slowed down a little.”

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For me, Daniels’s T pace is “comfortably hard”, but on a knife’s edge: going a few seconds/mile too fast, hitting a small hill, or turning into a headwind can make things quickly become very uncomfortable. Some days that pace is slower than others, so breaking workouts up into cruise intervals provides an opportunity to reorient and get that pace right.

Did a Daniels 4T + 3T + 2T + 1T workout yesterday. Not sure if that counts as a continuous tempo (4 miles!) or not, but it’s a favorite. Have a 20 miler at ~50k pace planned for Sunday. Not sure if that’s fast enough to be a “tempo.”

Good thread.

There called Cruise intervals. Read a Daniels book.

As a high school coach, a common complaint about the continuous tempo is that "high schoolers can't pace it right. They race it. etc..."

While that is true, I don't think that is an excuse to not include them. That is the point of coaching is teaching the athlete how to pace, maintain, and focus for a longer duration. To not do a type of workout because a kid might "mess it up" i think is a poor reason to not do it. Use the practice as an opportunity to try it and get better at it over months and years.

I use both broken up and continuous tempos so I see the pros and cons of both. My high school coach was only a continuous guy, college coach never let us go over 20 minutes. I find myself somewhere in the middle oftentimes.

I also feel like our athletes need to be able to get out smart, run steady, and finish fast on race day. If we never model that in practice and always keep things broken up I think it hurts the potential for that happening. In a race it isn't broken up it is continuous so training should be continuous often enough to help with that both physically and mentally.

Because it is utterly stupid. No one is looking for breaks. During a threshold interval session I'm not looking for breaks, I take them because that's what the session is. And during a race I'm not thinking about breaks - because guess what, I'm fckin racing. I've done nothing but interval workouts for the past year, it hasn't affected my mentality during races one bit.

A lot of coaches are lazy. Continuous tempos are hard to coach and make sure they stay on pace and do it right, so they don’t do it. Also the fear of failure. I love them for my team and it’s an important piece of our success.