Hardest workouts you have ever done?

letsbang wrote:

lease wrote:

Alan, how could you do 20 squats with your 10RM on the bar??? By definition, wouldn't you be maxed at 10?

They're called breathing squats, once you almost hit failure, you stand and catch your breath (without racking the weight), before doing singles to hit 20. It is brutal, but can put a ton of weight onto your squat max in a very short period of time.

Thanks, Alan. Yeah, I'm very familiar with breathing squats. You just didn't specify that in your initial post, so I thought something else might be going on.

Thanks for all your other posts through the years, by the way--great stuff!

--lease

26.48 miles at marathon pace.

3 workouts from HS stand out in my memory:

10x1000m at mile pace with 3 minute rest in between.

or

3 (2x600m @800 pace, 1000m @mile pace, 2x300m @400 pace)

Recovery was slow jog around to the start of the next rep with 5 minute full rest between sets.

or

500m repeats on our XC course, the last 150m was all out up a hill nicknamed "agony."

Former college hurdle workout: Set up a 110m run with only 5 hurdles instead of 10 so you have to chop your steps to 5 step in between. Run it and jog back.

Do 3 run/jogs, rest 3 minutes. We did 10 sets and it was agonizing at the end.

Lerms wrote:

3 workouts from HS stand out in my memory:

10x1000m at mile pace with 3 minute rest in between.

or

3 (2x600m @800 pace, 1000m @mile pace, 2x300m @400 pace)

Recovery was slow jog around to the start of the next rep with 5 minute full rest between sets.

or

500m repeats on our XC course, the last 150m was all out up a hill nicknamed "agony."

10x1000 at mile pace? wtf? how is that even possible?

Getting ready 3 weeks before a marathon. My coach has me run 2 hours to a local 5k. Then, lace up the flats and run the race as hard as you can. it was awesome. I ran 10 miles, found $10 on the road, continued, and got in just under 18 miles by the time I got to the race registration. Ran the race. Won the race. Ran negative splits, all under 5 min per mile, and left feeling very confident.

The hardest workout I have ever done would have to be the 18 miler we did in college.

It started with a 2.5 mile warmup.

switched to our tempo shoes and ran 3 miles in 15:30

then switched back to our trainers and ran 7 miles in about 47 minutes

Then back to our tempo shoes and ran 3 miles in 15:10

then cooled down 2.5 miles.

coach drived beside us from SUNY Cortland down route 11 to Marathon and we drove back.

it was pretty insane!

RedMulesRunning.com wrote:

coach drived beside us

Please tell me you didn't major in English.

Has to be asked wrote:

RedMulesRunning.com wrote:

coach drived beside us

Please tell me you didn't major in English.

Not to be too catty, but are you familiar with the academic level at Cortland State?

In high school, we did a 32 x 1 minute sprint one minute easy workout on a track.

It was abnormally hot that day (Just a hair under 100 iirc) and our usually sensible coach was REALLY pregnant (She literally gave birth that night) so she was not understanding at all and was yelling at us to go faster the entire time, even when we were doing about a full 400 with each interval. One of only three times when I have thrown up due to running

long rests wrote:

I've done many of these workouts and they are very tough! 20x400 with a minute rest, 5xmile when I was at Arkansas, etc, but this to me was easily my roughest:

8x300 all out with 5 minutes rest between each. Absolute killer!

I recall watching a former Arkansas runner (before he went to Arkansas, so while in HS) running a workout of 8-10 x 300m with 20 minutes rest between, running ~40sec each. He was a 1.51-2 guy at the time (3.44 1500 and 14 low 5k), and wondered why so much, so fast - almost all-out with so much recovery. It made very little sense to me (see Cram and his aversion to that kind of work for distance-oriented middle-distance runner), even though I understand the supposed physiological reasoning behind it.

I think the hardest I've ever done would be 3x500 @ 800 pace with 8 mins rest... Absolutely brutal.

It doesn't sound that bad, but the pain was unbelievable. It was over a year ago and I still remember it clearly... Nasty muthaf*cka of a session...

There have been others, but that takes the biscuit...

This is the genius of McDonnell. He knew that all out speed absolutely killed my legs. So, no all out for me. A lot of volume with very little rest. My best mile was 4:11, but I ran my last 2K of a 10K race in 5:18. My 400 PR was 56, but I ran 58s on the ends of 5Ks and 10Ks on the track. Meaning I had no leg speed, but I could run close to my max at the end of any race. I won a few and lost a few, but I scored a LOT of points for our team.

Bump. Good thread.

yuppers wrote:

Hardest workout was...

2 mile, 3 mile, 1 mile, 800, 800, 800, 1 mile.

3 minutes rest between each one.

3 mile warm up, 3 mile cool down. Separates the men from the boys.

Not even hard. Even at 10k pace.

Were you making it up as you went along?

40 minutes jogging to warm up and cool down lol. No wonder runners overestimate their aerobics fitness.

I have two.

5x500m @ mile pace with 90 seconds rest.

2x( 2x800m 2min rest, 8x100m 2min rest, 4x400m) @ 3k race pace

Those were the worst besides 1x 10k @ 10k race pace of course.

2x4k at 10k pace (13:58, 13:56) with 2 min static rest. That means no jogging or running allowed. It was a way of letting lactic acid build up to make the second rep harder. then a 400 at 100% in like 74 maybe.

2k repeats were tough for me when I was a sophomore.

I was a long distance runner coached by a former 800 runner for a while, so workouts would be something like 3x1000m all out. This dude would also not tell us the entire workout and when we thought we were done he'd have us do another rep, all out of course.

Dude would sometimes just tell us to warmup and not tell us the workout until we had spikes on. One time he walks up to us as we're lacing up and says "two mile time trial".

Under another coaches training, my toughest days were long runs. And I push the pace on long runs sometimes. One run that sticks out was a 13 miler with a 3 mile hill climb at the end.

I was on this kick for a while where I'd really rip my long runs of an average 16 miles. Then I would do a leg lift after that. The full session would be about 3 hours long. It took me like 3 days to really feel that that day was out of my system. I was in this groove for like 5-6 weeks.

The "Ryun", not familiar why we called it Ryun. Its a ladder workout: 8x200, 4x400, 2x800 1x1mile 1x2mi 1x1mi 2x800, 4x400, 8x200. 10 pushups after each rep too! This was in high school so everything was run at a "hard" effort. Unfortunately, don't recall the rest.

Often we could make a make a deal to not run the 2mile based on other interval times or pulling out nipple hairs. Too bad, I have no hair on my nips

12 x 800m at just under 10k pace with 400m running recovery.

9 miles in spikes when all is said and done.

Another gem was 3k @ 5k pace, 5min rest, 3k all out, 5min rest, then 4x400 at mile pace.

Set a 3k PR at the time on the second 3k.