10k watcher wrote:
Actually, there's a little bit more VALUE in those workouts that are right around 1000 meters or 1200 meters with SHORT REST in between, because that starts playing into the MENTAL ASPECT at practice. When you do those workouts and BURNING those THRESHOLDS, you mentally start going in practice, "Okay man, this is hard, this is where I'm at". And those are mental triggers that will come up in the race and help you get through it.
Quite the contrary. Knowing you can run continous sustained effort makes you stronger mentally and prepare you for races. Look up what Ron clarke had to say in regard:
"Frankly, we didn’t run all that far each day and I can testify that most of it was not too slow either. Our basic day-in day-out work out was 8 to 10 laps on the grass at Caulfield racecourse. At that time (not so recently unfortunately) the grass was beautiful – smooth and even and where we ran about 25 metres in from the fence (often barefooted), the distance of each lap was 1 ¼ miles plus 100 yards – around two kilometres – so we covered 16 to 20 kilometres each evening most, if not every week day, 50 or so weeks in the years.
But it wasn’t slow. We used to get faster and faster as the session progressed with very few still in the front pack by the end of the evening – certainly we were flowing along at better than a 5 minute mile pace, probably closer to 4.40 or even 4.30 each mile for the last 5 or 6 kilometres.
It was no disgrace to drop out – sometimes one or the other would have a great night and would run clear away early on but the general pattern was to settle into a rhythm, then gradually increase the tempo, and so we developed a skill that Dick doesn’t mention in his article but which I regard as the cornerstone of good distance running – rhythm.
All the top sports people attain it from repeating and repeating and then repeating again their basic actions. Running, uninterruptedly, at one notch from top pace, out of the comfort zone is where it is at.
You can only achieve this in long, non-stop, close to top speed (certainly not slow), good tempo running. The more you do it (and I’m talking years), the better you run. We all have the speed needed to break world records from 2 miles and up without any special effort. What’s difficult is to be able to conquer the mental and physical discipline of maintaining the tempo "