How Important is Speedwork to break 10k 30min?

One way to think about it:

To break 30 minutes, you have to be able to run sub-4:50 mile pace for more than six miles. Your 10K race pace needs to be 72 sec per 400m or faster.

In order for it to be physically possible (given sufficient aerobic training etc) for you to run 25 x 400m in sub-72 with zero sec rest, how fast do you think your top 400m speed needs to be? And how much speedwork do you need to do, in order to attain/maintain that top 400m speed?

My pr for 10k on the track is 29:47 (though it was many years ago.) I still have my workouts documented from way back. I did a total of three interval workouts prior to that 29:47. Two repeat 400 meter workouts and one repeat 600 meter workout. My avg pace for the 4's was 67 with similar pace for the 600's. I just did a lot of tempo runs. So you really don't need a lot of speed work to break 30,

hmm.... am so confused because i have very less knowledge on how endurance speed training works .... just few hours back i did an all out 400m on a straight road and did around 62/63 sec... but i suppose an all out 400m doesn't reflect anything much towards distance running performance huh...? i have yet to experiment with 400m repeats and such ..

Coureur des bois wrote:

My pr for 10k on the track is 29:47 (though it was many years ago.) I still have my workouts documented from way back. I did a total of three interval workouts prior to that 29:47. Two repeat 400 meter workouts and one repeat 600 meter workout. My avg pace for the 4's was 67 with similar pace for the 600's. I just did a lot of tempo runs. So you really don't need a lot of speed work to break 30,

thanks for sharing ...very interesting training method.... so you mean you did 3 sets of 400x2 and 600x1....is that right ? ... and what was your average pace for your tempo runs?.... if i may ask how long it took you to get down from 34 minutes to 29:47?

Internetsherlock wrote:

Coureur des bois wrote:

My pr for 10k on the track is 29:47 (though it was many years ago.) I still have my workouts documented from way back. I did a total of three interval workouts prior to that 29:47. Two repeat 400 meter workouts and one repeat 600 meter workout. My avg pace for the 4's was 67 with similar pace for the 600's. I just did a lot of tempo runs. So you really don't need a lot of speed work to break 30,

thanks for sharing ...very interesting training method.... so you mean you did 3 sets of 400x2 and 600x1....is that right ? ... and what was your average pace for your tempo runs?.... if i may ask how long it took you to get down from 34 minutes to 29:47?

Yeah this is interesting... I'd be curious to see how you split up the training week by week.

I think he meant he did three separate workouts. Two of them consisted of some amount of 400m repeats. The other one consisted of 600m repeats.

Internetsherlock wrote:

Do some runners break 30 just by hard efforts on long runs during training ?

Yes.

Here's former American Record Holder Mark Nenow's training:

"There are so many ideas out there about how you trained. I guess I should hit them one by one. How much mileage did you do?

In that period of time, I ran a lot of miles. The 100 mile per week mark is kind of goal. This was kind of the convention of the time. I ran way over 100 miles per week EVERY week. I’m sure some weeks I touched on 150 miles per week. It was pretty hard running. Once you get in shape, your body is wired to do this. I would roll these miles week in and week out at a pretty good clip. Probably, all of them under six minute mile pace. A lot of them under 5 minutes pace or under. It was long running at a sustained pace, but my body was able to sustain a pretty fast pace back then. In terms of mileage, I did plenty of miles.

I guess you did that on doubles.

Yes, I did it on 13 runs a week. Twice a day except Sunday.

How long were you long runs?

I would run 22 miles on Sunday. That was the longest for sure.

I guess the other thing that I read is that you used to run at night.

I did. That’s one of the things when I’m thinking about college and some of those things I mentioned earlier about the program and my disappointment when I was at Kentucky. It kind of left me with two things. It left me with the night running thing and that was because the coach that was there never got the team organized to run in the morning or to run a second workout so we were kind of on our own to do a second run. I remember myself and a couple of other guys on the team started developing night runs. We’d go to an afternoon workout and we knew every distance runner in the country was running twice. We just thought, let’s do this night run. I think that was a left over from my college days. I got my second run at night.

At what time?

10-11 o’clock. 11 would be the latest that I’d head out.

I guess that kept you out of bars.

Yeah, it did, but I wasn’t going to be in a bar anyway. It kept me out of bars, exactly. I sure didn’t mean to, but it also gave me this sound bite. I’ve been out of the sport for so many years, but people even to this day and they aren’t very many that I bump in to, that’s some of the things they remember about me. ‘You’re that guy who used to run at night all the time!’ I have heard some embellished sound bites that I used to run at 3 in the morning. I’m like ‘No, I never used to train at 3 in the morning.’ The other thing was I was always a little leery about was coaching. I think again that was probably a knee jerk thing because of the program I went through in college. I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth about coaching. I think that is why once I got out of college, I was so relieved that it took many years for people to convince me that I needed a little help. ‘You could use a little guidance’ ‘You could use a little coaching.’

What were the types of workouts that you did? All I’ve read, there is no mention of intervals or formal workouts. Are those myths? What was your training like?

It was kind of the same thing every day. I used to do an awful lot of work. I think I was in extremely good shape. I probably had an enormous base to operate off of. The kind of base that you should build and then go to some real keen interval training. I built that base year in and year out for most of the year. I think the sharpening and the real fine tuning, I never really did. I used to run the same thing everyday. I would run the same loops. I had probably three or four loops around Lexington from my house that took me 70-75 minutes to run and they were probably all 12 -14 mile loops. At night, I had 2-4, seven mile loops. I would do that day in and day out and then on Sunday do a long run. Then what I would do during the day on Tuesday or Thursday or whatever, I would do a long loop on a really hilly course. Lexington is a really hilly place, so I would run over really hilly terrain. In some ways, it would be a long run of 12 miles, but in essence, it kind of did turn in to more intervals of seven times a mile hill because I was doing this specific loop. For the most part, it was strength running and plowing the miles. I didn’t get on a track except to race. I think looking back on that, it was to my detriment for sure.

How did you have a sense of a 27:36 pace?

I didn’t have any sense of that at all. I had no idea. I think two weeks before that race, I ran a 5k in 13 or 14 something all by myself at the Kentucky Relays or something. I thought, wow, I’m feeling good. I think the week before the 27:36, I ran a mile or 1,500 meters somewhere in another small meet in Kentucky too. Then, I went out to Mt. Sac. But you know, that’s what I did. I remember Mt. Sac was three or four Africans. It was Gabriel Kamau, Zach Barie Michael Musyoki and one other guy. Those guys were off like a train and I was just running with them. I didn’t have a sense of pace. I didn’t hear anything. I just tried to stick with those guys. I had a breakthrough race. Those kind of things never bothered me and I never really thought about them.

By 1986, you set the American Record[A 27:20.56 victory in Brussels. One of only three Americans to win. Bill McChesney, 1982, and Bruce Bickford, 1984 were the others].

To answer the OP, breaking 30 depends on your talent level. Nenow could have run 40 MPW at 7 minute pace to break 30 because it is 2:40 slower than his potential. I broke 30 by running 70 MPW and doing some tempos but no real speedwork. Nenow breaking 30 is like me running 32:40 which I could have done on 30 MPW. People always ask these questions without providing enough background.

Wow never heard of this legend ... Just incredible what some people can do what most people would deem it as unconventional training

talent beats training wrote:

To answer the OP, breaking 30 depends on your talent level. Nenow could have run 40 MPW at 7 minute pace to break 30 because it is 2:40 slower than his potential. I broke 30 by running 70 MPW and doing some tempos but no real speedwork. Nenow breaking 30 is like me running 32:40 which I could have done on 30 MPW. People always ask these questions without providing enough background.

thats a tricky speculation because how can he break 30 if he just trains at 7 minute pace for 40mpw , i presume he would at-least need to get used to the speed of 30min 10k ...also i wonder what decides the threshold for talent ... maybe you could have also attained the 27:XX minutes mark if you did 100miles training for a year or two and then 30minutes becomes easy eventually ? do you think that would have happened ?

And regarding this thread , my main concern is to understand the principle of speed work so i didn't provide background about me, but sure i'd like to break 30min one day :)

In short, yes. Everyone can name drop some pro who wouldn't need to. Reality is, for your "average" person trying to break 30, you need speed work.

The faster you can go, the more efficient you are at a reduced percentage of said speed. Sub 8 broke it down well. How comfortable are you running 72s 400s? Now how comfortable are you running sub 60 400s?

Chances are, if you get sub 60 or better etc to feel easier, then you become more efficient.

No. I know many people who run 30 MPW at 8 minute pace. They enter 3 or 4 races per year and run a 19 minute 5k. Everybody can get off of the couch and run some type of pace. Talented people run much faster. Imagine somebody running a 10 minute mile today for the first time. Your logic is that they had to run 4x400 at 2:30 previously to learn the speed. But that is not true. I answered your other question by using Nenow as the example. Yes he could run an easy 30 minute 10k because he was in shape for a 27 minute 10k. But he could have run a hard 30 minute 10k without training.

This is amazing. But dont you guys think that, given what we might know about sport physiology and how 99% of other athletes train, the guy was probably underperforming?

maaaybe.. wrote:

This is amazing. But dont you guys think that, given what we might know about sport physiology and how 99% of other athletes train, the guy was probably underperforming?

Probably not. The hard/easy approach is not the 'best' approach for everyone. Some kind of runners react better to lots of steady miles. Steve Jones trained in a similar way and i can't say he underperformed...

To the OP, under 30 10k won't happen without a great base speed and I don't believe that everyone can do it just with specific training. You need a fair amount of natural talent.

maaaybe.. wrote:

This is amazing. But dont you guys think that, given what we might know about sport physiology and how 99% of other athletes train, the guy was probably underperforming?

Sure, if he was running now, he'd be faster. But underperform? Not in terms of PRs. He ran a 27:22 road 10K (not record eligible course) when the 10,000 m track world record was 27:22. His 27:20 was less than 7 seconds off the world record at the time, and would have been the world record two years earlier.

10k speed is a tad faster than the anaerobic threshold (AT) Today there is practical evidence and theoretic reasons why a lot of training should be close to or at the AT to lower it as much as possible. Still, 10k speed is faster and one need to be as efficient at that speed as possible to reach ones potential. To be efficient at 10k speed one need to run at 10k speed and some faster to make the muscles and the legs mechanically used to run at this speed properly relaxed, etc. Of course it is good to be able to kick, finish strong and so on, needing even faster speed work, but it does not account for that much of the total 10k time. AT also depend A LOT on the aerobic capacity which is built from milage and general running.

So I would have run a lot at AT and doen various speed work at or slightly faster than 10k to become really efficient at that speed.

Coureur des bois wrote:

My pr for 10k on the track is 29:47 (though it was many years ago.) I still have my workouts documented from way back. I did a total of three interval workouts prior to that 29:47. Two repeat 400 meter workouts and one repeat 600 meter workout. My avg pace for the 4's was 67 with similar pace for the 600's. I just did a lot of tempo runs. So you really don't need a lot of speed work to break 30,

When I ran in the 29's I would do a 16X400 almost every week at 67-68 with about a min recov. That was what I would consider the speedwork. Maybe some 200's and 300s at the end of some workouts. But did a lot of longer intervals and tempos. You don't need to be real fast but you have to be able to hold 4:40s pace.

I guess Kenny B probably doesn't need speedwork. But for mere mortals like myself I had to do some quick things to be able to get sub 30.

It sort of depends on what people mean by speed work. Can you get in really good 10k shape by running miles and then doing 2 workouts at HM pace (i.e. tempo work)? You bet. That HM pace is pretty darn close to race pace and the overall demands of the race. Will you be in better shape with some 5k pace work (i.e. those 67s?) Sure. Will adding in mile pace help? Sure to some extent it will make that 5k pace feel a bit more comfortable. Will doing actual speed work (i.e. 400m pace or faster) really help? Maybe a little. There is some evidence that it helps with efficiency. But compared to the threshold work, it isn't high on the list.

Coureur des bois wrote:

My pr for 10k on the track is 29:47 (though it was many years ago.) I still have my workouts documented from way back. I did a total of three interval workouts prior to that 29:47. Two repeat 400 meter workouts and one repeat 600 meter workout. My avg pace for the 4's was 67 with similar pace for the 600's. I just did a lot of tempo runs. So you really don't need a lot of speed work to break 30,

Yeah but was your lifetime miles and training like? Or did you go from couch to 29:47 in one training cycle?