Vigil 800M Training Road to the Top

Been a long time since I read that book but I am guessing those are 800m pace.

the thing with the 800m is you have 46s guys running 25mpw and running 1:48 and 49s guys running 70mpw and running 1:48. Both work depending on who you are. The basic components are the same but how you blend them will differ. On this board you will find a lot of the strength based approaches. You will not find as many examples of the speed guys.

The 200's you mean are at 800 pace? Thanks for taking the time to reply to me too. Vigil does a good job in the book of explaining paces, his rest periods seem to vary a lot between what he said could be from 45 seconds to 3-minutes so that part was confusing. Other than that he does describe precise paces well.

I think on some 800 threads they mentioned a lot of intervals at 1500 to 3k pace? They also mentioned staying away from lactate threshold saying the pace was too slow.

The rest depends on what you are doing. 3 mins is a workout where you are practing running fast but not too stressful. 45s really starts to hurt after those first couple.

Threshold is mixed. Lots of people do hard 5 mile runs or mile repeats. Or even things like 16x400 with 45s rest. Others as you say do more vo2 with repeat 800s/1k. And a lot of people mix it up depending on time of the year.

If you google, you should be able to find nick symonds 2012 training log. He is sort of that middle guy with moderate volume and speed and it is great to see a full year of training rather than just a few weeks.

Multiple 200s @ 27 would be appropriate for a guy that's capable of a sub 1:50.

You can play with the rest depending on what you're trying to do. A workout that my guys hated (but it was effective) was 3 x 2 x 200. 30 seconds between reps, 5-7 min between sets. First one would be close to 400m race speed and the second one, they had to try and hold onto current 800m rp.

I think coaching/training the 800 is one of the hardest running events to figure out. My guess is because the approaches are DRASTICALLY different from each other. Some are all speed and strength and no real mileage. Some go the more traditional route from a distance runner perspective.

Thanks for reminding me :) We will run our 200 repeats at various speeds throughout the year and a good stimulus after some good aerobic work. Early season it might be 200's in 30 seconds w/short rest which is much slower than the 26 second pace (1:46 athlete) race pace. At other times we might run 200's avg 24's. It really depends on the what the goal of the session is an what time of year.

I'm not sure what 8x200 at 100% means so best to ask that OP.

Good luck!

The rest also depends on the time of year. He gives examples of different 200 meter workouts on page 82.

lmao we got coachwill, coachy, coachb, and coahc in here.

I'll add to the "coach party" namesake on this thread.

3 main workouts a week, the other 4 days being easy runs (with maybe with a few drills or strides).

Higher/senior level athletes can add an easy 20 minute jog (morning of evening) when they are ready. Its a great valve to add in the off season to ramp aerobic endurance and on that can easily be dropped or cut-back in frequency in-season when legs get tired and work-outs and racing get more intense.

Off season includes more form drill sessions and hill or stair repeats and general stamina to build strength and capacity for those in-season workouts. I like thinking of it as building more road-ways for the Porche I'm going build in-season to run on.

In-season is more straight repeats often mixing the 3 days between 1 session at 800 goal pace for race specific adaptation, 1 session at quicker then goal pace for speed development, and 1 session at slower than goal pace for strength/stamina.

Healthy amount of racing, no better way to get a feel for tactics and what your strength and weaknesses are against peers then to get in there and race frequently. Also hardens the mind to dealing with the pain of the 800.

I know all that is pretty vague but you'll have to fill that in a specific runner basis.

One more thing:

If you runners are more middle distance runners a good speed development workout I like early in the season is:

8 laps on the track, in each lap slowly jogging the first 250 meters, then ramping up steadily coming around the rest of the turn and finally hitting top-end speed the last 50 meters. Focus on good form/technique at top-end speed.

Anyways, good luck this season. Hope some of our rambling are helpful or spark ideas.

Sorry, what I meant is that someone running repeats in 27 seconds doesn't specify much as some athletes I know can't run ONE 200 that fast or if they did they would be flat out (100%) so I just wanted clarification on what the pace actually is as one runner's 200 repeats may be at 800 pace while that same speed would be way too fast for someone less fit.

You definitely win the thread for having the best coach name out of all of us, haha; thanks for your input, it truly is appreciated. In Vigil's book he really enjoys doing progressions at a certain percent of the runner's current best speed in their event.

One workout he has is 4-8x800 at 85% of current 800 pace, then 88%, 91% and finally 94%. All of these have 3-minutes recoveries. What is he trying to improve with this workout and do you think it's a good one?

Are you talking about Page 82 in the Road to the Top book?

It's on Page 79 where above Tables 5.11-5.14 which are 800/1500 Interval workouts he says the rest can be anywhere from 45 seconds-3-minutes. Do you think he's suggesting doing the workouts with longer rest earlier in the year then repeating the same workout but gradually reducing rest times as a peak approaches?

Train the athlete, not the event.

Mold the training to each runner, not each runner into a system.

The common denominator among the strength based or speed based 800 meter training is speed endurance training. Vigil's answer for this is his "acceleration workout" (actually lifted from Peter Coe) There are two versions, the first using repeats starting at 100 meters and adding an additional 10 meters each rep up to 200 meters, with paces starting at mile pace for the 100 and increasing the pace of each rep until the final 200 is at 400 pace. Walk rest back to start lines which move further each time ...a complicated workout to calculate and set up on the track! The second version does the same but starting at 200 meters and increasing an additional 20 meters per rep finishing at 300 meters. Same pace progression, mile to 400 pace. Again, complicated. Doing each of these 10 to 14 days apart from each other, approx 4 weeks out from peak goal race is magic sauce. Vigil, and especially Coe had great success with this workout.

I interviewed 2012 Olympic Discus thrower Jason Young many times a few years ago. He spent hours telling me that "America uses talent, they do not develop it." One year I did a quick study of high school boys 800 meter runners. I do not remember the year but it was around 2018. 4000 boys ran under 2:00. (I did not count multiple sub 2:00 efforts to get the number 4000. Also there were coaches who never reported their times to our company...FloSports.) Yet America has had exactly one 1500 Gold Medalist in the 1500 and one in the 5000.

I think it was Wejo who posted his training from after he graduated from college. He got faster by mostly running double Aerobic runs each day. He did not worry about the speed, in fact often those runs were slow, but he was consistent. He did the training.

The problem with America is that coaches, parents, and kids try to get everything out of themselves in high school because many good kids do not have the opportunity or luxury of running in college and beyond. I have written this message many times but so far I am not sure anyone has listened to it.

Because it is a load of trash😂Seriously you can’t even get the number of US 1500m medalist right.😂 And as pertinent to this topic the US has been the most dominant nation in the 800. We are just in the middle of a 50 year slump😂

but yeah US runners are burning themselves out while guys like Jakob Ingebrigsten, the Kenyans and Ethiopians and the rest aren’t training hard at all as teens….

The US has issues but it isn’t because people train to hard as kids.

I actually was familiar with these from his book but never knew when exactly in the season to start doing them and how frequently, thanks for much for that extra info