How Important is Speedwork to break 10k 30min?

I was never blazing fast. Only ran a 51.xx for an all out 400m. Might have been able to run faster but never really tested it. To break 30 for the 10K you do need some speed along with some fast tempo runs. My weekly mileage was usually around 60-75 for the bulk of my serious running career. My "speed" training consisted of mostly a lot of 800's, 1200's, and repeat miles. I've only broken 30 twice and just barely at that. Both were at road races one being the Peachtree way back when. I mostly ran the 5000, steeple, and 1500 in college as well as XC.

To break 30 you would probably have needed to develop your basic speed at some point in your life. Nobody is jumping off the couch to being a 30 minute 10k runner with just easy runs.

Now if your post college a few years and want to get back into it. Sure you could go the milage and tempo route with some strides here and there but it would be a lot more effective if you threw in some interval sessions.

Definitely. Something like 60m all out are clearly speed work. After that it gets vague. A lot of time people break it down to on the track is speed work, everything else isnt.

I would loved to be able to see some garmin data from someone like Clarke or Nenow to figure out exactly what they did. It was obviously very, very effective without hitting the high end heart rates/speeds that we normally think of as being needed. I want to say it was Jack Daniels who started the idea of paces slower than MP (call it like 40-50s off 5k pace) but faster than easy running (call it 90s off 5k pace at the high end) being a junk zone to be avoided but in the past there were definitely runners who spend a lot of time there. Might turn out dong 30-60mins at roughly MP or slightly 3x+ week is actually really good at developing aerobic capacity in a good junk of people.

For what this might be worth, there was a high school coach in California called Jack Farrell who was pretty successful and who has gotten some attention here in the past. He's written some articles about how he trained his teams and there was very little or nothing that we'd call speed work or tapering. Nearly everything he did was steady aerobic running that added mileage progressively and then had those miles run at progressively faster paces. He said that he found that his kids would usually be able to race at about a minute per mile faster than their training pace was.

The volume wasn't massive, I think upperclassmen would maybe get to a hair under 60 mpw and they were racing 5, not 10 km. But from this you could theorize that maybe a bit more mileage would allow someone to run 10 km a minute per mile faster than his/her training pace. So enough miles at 5:50 pace might get you there.

Do a 10 minute tempo run 4:40 pace. U should do this fairly easily. Also 12x400 67 seconds with 1 minute rest. The rest easy runs and once a week long easy 15 miler

Will just correct you on Michael Musyoki training . He ran fast intervals( e.g 6-8 x 800m) and fast tempos ( an hour at 5 min per mile pace) as well in training and ran mostly just one session per day and quite low mileage.

Now that you mention it, I do kind of recall reading that Musyoki did sessions like you mention. Thanks. But I also recall reading that he often covered 12 miles or so in that hour so he'd have been over 80 a week which is not real low.

Amby Burfoot is a good case study of a guy who didn't do speedwork. He was profiled in one of Joe Henderson's books about long, slow distance training. Some of these guys ran decently high mileage but didn't do speedwork. Rather, they relied on frequent racing as their workouts. Burfoot ran 2:14:28 at Fukuoka. Most people with that marathon PR would be sub 30 for sure, and many would be sub 29, but Burfoot never broke 30 as far as I can tell.

consider this wrote:

Amby Burfoot is a good case study of a guy who didn't do speedwork. He was profiled in one of Joe Henderson's books about long, slow distance training. Some of these guys ran decently high mileage but didn't do speedwork. Rather, they relied on frequent racing as their workouts. Burfoot ran 2:14:28 at Fukuoka. Most people with that marathon PR would be sub 30 for sure, and many would be sub 29, but Burfoot never broke 30 as far as I can tell.

I think Amby's six mile best was given as 29:25 in Joe's book. He had an 8:45 two mile best as well. Both of those times suggest he could have been comfortably under 30:00 for 10,000 meters. One thing you have to keep in mind when you look at fairly uncharacteristic times is how seriously the runner was about a particular distance and/or how many chances they had to race it. Bill Rodgers' best track 10,000 was 28:04. But he rarely raced that distance on the track. Bill Squires will tell you BR would have done 27:40 if he'd been serious about it.

Amby told me that when he was in college he definitely did not do speed work in the formal sense. But he raced almost weekly , sometimes 2-3 times weekely, at anything from a half mile to six miles and that, he later understood, was speed work.

Jack Farrell's program did use speed work and tapering. There's a good explanation of their training on this thread by one of his runners.

cassaka2 wrote:We did different repetition work depending on what we were training for. In XC we did 4x1320 or 3x1 mile on a cross-type of terrain, at race pace. In track we did typical track workouts, based on our individual events. Coach Farrell definitely believes in muscle memory, so we always did repetitions at the pace we would race at.

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,

If you had trained properly you could have run a lot faster.

Here's a listing of several articles written by Jack Farrell.

https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=002327041236569561668:kuacop4eb8i&q=farrell&oq=farrell&gs_l=partner-generic.3...18938.20205.0.20623.7.7.0.0.0.0.125.746.1j6.7.0.csems%2Cnrl%3D13...0.1215j260335j7...1.34.partner-generic..7.0.0.62TV63qMHWg

ukathleticscoach wrote:

If you had trained properly you could have run a lot faster.

What is your fastest 10k time and, based on that, what would you have done differently.

HRE wrote:

I think Amby's six mile best was given as 29:25 in Joe's book. He had an 8:45 two mile best as well. Both of those times suggest he could have been comfortably under 30:00 for 10,000 meters.

Define comfortably under 30. I mean, 29:25 for 6 miles suggest about 29:59 for 10000.

What I mean is that as far as I know Amby didn't race a lot of 10,000s or six miles. Maybe he did and I am wrong but if I'm not his six mile may not represent his ability at that distance and that if he'd had more opportunities with good competition, assuming he didn't, you can imagine a much faster 6/10,000 time.

HRE wrote:

What I mean is that as far as I know Amby didn't race a lot of 10,000s or six miles. Maybe he did and I am wrong but if I'm not his six mile may not represent his ability at that distance and that if he'd had more opportunities with good competition, assuming he didn't, you can imagine a much faster 6/10,000 time.

On ARRS you can find a lot of results for shorter distance races for Burfoot and they don't suggest he could run 'comfortably' under 30 at all.

The calculators I checked convert a 2:14:28 marathon to ten km times of 28:29 to 29:14. An 8:45two mile got a ten km range of 29:06 to 29:14.

HRE wrote:

The calculators I checked convert a 2:14:28 marathon to ten km times of 28:29 to 29:14. An 8:45two mile got a ten km range of 29:06 to 29:14.

I know those those are the equivalents for his marathon but my point is he never ran near those times because he didn't do the speedwork. As for the 2 mile it was probably in college or something when his training was completely different.

ukathleticscoach 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,

If you had trained properly you could have run a lot faster.

Try to define "proper training" and you will see it differs from coach to coach.