How to advance Thresholds advice

Have her run a new TT if old paces feel easy. If pace is faster adjust training paces.

Run by feel yo.

Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box wrote:

Run by feel yo.

As a younger runner I often ran myself into the ground because I liked how it felt to run hard. Concrete paces are a great thing if you fall into that camp.

in my training experience, it's been increasing the amount of reps and the pace, as fitness improves - and usually keeping the distance of each rep the same.

Konfuzi wrote:

Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box wrote:

Run by feel yo.

As a younger runner I often ran myself into the ground because I liked how it felt to run hard. Concrete paces are a great thing if you fall into that camp.

Concete paces?

It honestly depends on the goal of the threshold workouts and what you are training for.

As someone that’s trying to improve in XC distances, I do 2 threshold/tempo efforts a week. On one of these workouts I aim to cross the threshold at some point and be miserable for 3-5 minutes, and for the other workout I aim to increase the time I can hang above my threshold. The two differing workouts seem to work well together, but if I were in my middle distance phase of training, I’d probably just be doing the workouts where I cross the threshold towards the end.

As another poster said, going off of feel for inexperienced runners can be a recipe for disaster.

Don`t listen to amateurs, lol ! Here comes the KOOL AID MAN to help you out The real PRO! ))

Well.......you can vary the LT intervals in eternity.....so many options to make them funnier for your girl. Doesn`t matter the length of the reps but keep the pace the same and about half marathon pace . You can give her straight LTs and sometimes vary with ladder LTs and so on.instead of giving fixed rests between reps just follow listen to her heart and what it says.....let her rest back to about 60 % of her MHR between reps and she will get perfect individual resttime.Over time her level will improve and the LTs will go faster. Good luck! :)

The Kool Aid Man J.S :)

You could retest but that's more trouble than it's worth. Drop the pace occasionally, for example monthly or every few weeks, as fitness improves.

Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box wrote:

Run by feel yo.

Simple, and true. You should help your runner learn the effort level required to hit those zones. Those zones change week by week, maybe not drastically but if you're upping mileage or workload a tired athlete might only need to hit 5:30 pace to hit threshold when normally it's 5:25.

SUPERIOR COACH JS wrote:

Well.......you can vary the LT intervals in eternity.....

Those are really long intervals.

Really, don't worry about being exactly at lactate threshold throughout a workout or throughout a season. In fact I would encourage getting away from trying to find out where the "threshold" or "VO2 Max" points are and using them as guiding factors. Unless you are able to measure her blood lactate throughout the workout it's really more of a "guess" than it is a "science."

I look at it two ways. First, I am "pushing" my lactate threshold curve to the right by doing work at just below my lactate threshold -- everything from steady state to half-marathon pace fits this definition. If you keep the volume roughly the same, the paces should get faster as you layer in other types of work throughout the season/year at the same perceived effort. Keep in mind that as the runner gets more trained, their lactate threshold will move from steady-state, to marathon-pace, to half-marathon pace, to potentially 10-mile/15K pace if they're good (this is why I think most people do a Daniels threshold run and it basically is a race effort).

The other way you look at it is by "pulling" the lactate threshold curve by doing short bouts of work at just above my lactate threshold. This is where things like fartleks come into play where you do a small portion of work at 10K effort or faster (generally 5K/10K pace) and then float the recovery portion and force the body to figure out how to clear lactate in that timeframe and at a solid pace.

Anyway, I would encourage getting up to 20 - 25 mins worth of work, keeping it there, and then pushing the paces as they get more fit. I also encourage using real-world race paces to guide workouts (MP, HM, 10K, etc.) because those biological markers are always shifting and reacting to different factors. Get them to feel what the actual race effort feels like.

His pace should naturally drop over time, but you can't really prescribe that. Learning to feel your threshold is key, and will have benefits beyond workouts, since assessing effort is essential to racing well. Plus, that will allow you to feel confident doing workouts off track, in bad conditions, or off injury.

Doing fartlek, tempos, or some classic workouts with fast recoveries (Aussie quarters, Mona Fartlek) is a good way to develop that feeling. Of course you could also just test threshold occasionally, as some Scandinavians do.

So my question was sort of which to advance, the distance or time. Sound s like most of you suggest its sort of a steady volume. But of course that LT pace will improve. We are pretty good at this point at finding the pace between HR, Daniels, and perceived effort, TTs. I was just wondering if you push the volume at all (1500 runner). maybe 20 ish minutes as one LT or broken is pretty good?

Thanks,

bigmig19 wrote:

So my question was sort of which to advance, the distance or time. Sound s like most of you suggest its sort of a steady volume. But of course that LT pace will improve. We are pretty good at this point at finding the pace between HR, Daniels, and perceived effort, TTs. I was just wondering if you push the volume at all (1500 runner). maybe 20 ish minutes as one LT or broken is pretty good?

Thanks,

When I was training for half marathons I started with 4 x 8 minutes at threshold, or a single run of 20 minutes. Over the course if the plan I gradually progressed it to stuff like 3 x 10 minutes, then 2 x 15 maybe. The 20 minute run progressed to 25 and even longer but that's pretty darn hard for a midweek workout.

bigmig19 wrote:

So my question was sort of which to advance, the distance or time. Sound s like most of you suggest its sort of a steady volume. But of course that LT pace will improve. We are pretty good at this point at finding the pace between HR, Daniels, and perceived effort, TTs. I was just wondering if you push the volume at all (1500 runner). maybe 20 ish minutes as one LT or broken is pretty good?

Thanks,

Distance and time are the same way of measuring volume, so if you go by distance keep it to 3 miles of work; if you go by time keep it to 20 minutes of work. Don't have to make it more complicated than that.

In your case I would get up to that 5K worth of reps or a 3-mile tempo run and just work on improving the pace. At some point the pace will level off and plateau and stop improving; takes between 8 - 12 weeks. That's a sign it's time to throw lactate threshold work into maintenance mode and start working on 3K - 10K pace reps.

A few things you can do to progress thresholds. So you’ve established a pace early on in the season. Great. Train at that for, say, a month. At that point, take new race times and fitness into account and adjust. Maybe if you were doing 5x1k turn it into 5x1200 or 6x1k. Or keep it at 5x1k and drop the pace. I like increasing the distance because it has you spend more time in the threshold zone, but 5x1200 is also a harder strength workout than 5x1k for almost all high schoolers.

Switch it up. Drop the pace, increase the distance, increase the reps. Not all at once. Not everytime. But as fitness progresses and once in a while try new things