Are continuous tempo runs dead?

I mean if you think about muscle tension doing 6 mi threshold vs 6mi of threshold broken up at a similar pace your going to have higher vs lower relative muscle tension. Maybe less stressful on the body. 5k plus 1min is more marathon pace and probably less stressful on the body.

No, they are not. Just because everyone is jumping on the hype train, doesn't mean they are training optimally. For distances above 5k, the continuous tempo is probably the biggest bang for your buck run you can do.

Maybe. Op says he did these on trails over hills.

It might be just a tad slow, but thats better than a tad too fast over a season.

I have my team do "broken" tempos because:

1) they are in HS and they have ZERO sense of pace. If I tell them to do 4M @ tempo, they will either end up racing it hard and burn themselves up/or jog around at medium pace. Breaking the tempo up into chunks keeps them focused and honed in.

2)We're in the South and XC season is just brutal until the very very very end of the season. Breaking up the tempo makes it more doable, somewhat reduces the cumulative affects of the heat, and lets them grab some water between reps.

The Jack Daniels 20 minute "threshold tempo" is dead. Run threshold intervals or sub-threshold tempos. As Jakob's recent HM debut attests, unbroken tempo runs are still essential for longer races. That is, if you only ever do 10k volume of work in a single session, don't expect your body to support your engine well past 10k.

Tempo runs do have benefits for those racing shorter distances as well, especially psychological benefits. For HS athletes, I would focus on threshold intervals. For those with a more aerobic profile, I would maybe alternate long run one week with a sub-threshold tempos the next week. This would supplement, not replace, the threshold intervals.

Yeah, they’re completely dead. Long interval sessions are easier and better in every way. Finally elites are waking up to this reality.

I believe that broken intervals teach people to race slow.

As a high school coach, I have observed that 10%-25% of XC kids run tempo pace almost every day. Even many people who seem to know what they are doing will hit tempo effort several times/week during "easy" runs.

I'm not sure they're dead, but they've completely fallen out of favor. And until someone can say "I know I can get in more work with a continuous threshold session versus intervals" I don't expect that to change any time soon.

Now one aspect of that discussion that I think should be talked about more is how much longer an interval session needs to be to match the amount of work compared to a continuous run. Meaning, and I hope I'm stating the obvious, a continuous 5 mile run is a more effective workout physiologically than 5xmile with a few minutes rest.

So when you feel like you've just hammered out a "monster" workout because it was some distance you could never have completed if it was one single effort, it's because you could have done the same work in one shorter effort. You're not necessarily getting a BETTER workout because it felt easier. There's no free lunch here just because they're intervals. Just something to think about before you totally abandon continuous tempo runs.

5k + 1 minute pace never did anything for me.

My 5k pace is 5:30 so it would be 6:30. I did a lot of 5-7 mile runs at 6:30-6:50 and it never seemed to improve my fitness

The vast majority of high school aged runners will improve almost no matter what training they are doing (show up to the season out of shape, make huge aerobic gains throughout the season). The only exception to this are the coaches who make them to fast track intervals 2 times a week. That is why I really don't understand why some high school teams suck so bad. These kids improve no matter what you give them! Threshold intervals, tempo runs, hill repeats, a race a week to get the juices flowing, just run baby!!!!! It is such an easy formula for high schoolers.

That said, as an older runner I find the absolute best bang for my buck workout I can do is 8-10 miles at 45-60 secs slower than 5k pace. It is challenging but not all out and if I just do one of these a week with no other workouts I make huge gains in fitness.

I disagree. Intervals really are a free lunch. The rest allows your anaerobic system to partially recover so that less stress is placed on your aerobic system. So you can do more fast running with less of a recovery cost with intervals.

Nah tempos are still used by a lot of folks.

A classic 20 min tempo, 8-10 mile tempo for college xc will always be there

Too many people make the same mistake with tempos, even if they average what they'd expect to be the appropriate pace for set distance. Obviously they should be done to feel but they should also be progressive. A well executed tempo should likely start at even below marathon pace and, as you get into good rhythm, the pace will naturally drop. You may feel as if you're flying along towards the back end of a tempo but, if and when things become a strain and you start thinking about holding on until the end, know when to stop and cut it.

Starting conservatively and going through the gears helps the body warm up into it (even if you've done jogging, strides, etc beforehand) and keeps the lactate levels under control the whole time. Often if you attempt to run a tempo by even-splitting whatever a calculator tells you, you'll end up straining trying to hold pace and it'll become a glorified time-trial, depleting the benefits and increasing injury risk.

After Yobes Ondieki was the first man to break 27 mins in 1993 (before super shoes or pacing lights), he reportedly said if you are in shape you should be able to run a hard 10 miles (continuous) at anytime during your season.

What's interesting about that comment is he fellow countryman, Tergat, would run 9 miles @ 4:50 pace 2-3 times a week. So Kenyans were doing a bunch of long tempos at high altitude. Tergat is one of the best XC runners of all time with 5 straight world individual titles. Worked for them.

Physiologically, you can get more training stimulus in breaking up your threshold run into intervals AND I agree that HS kids are likely to run them wrong. However, here are a couple of caveats

1. HS kids need to know how to run the engine hot for 20-40 minutes without blowing up. Breaking threshold sessions into intervals does not accomplish this.

2. Even adult runners still can benefit from the mental aspect of locking in for a continuous tempo run.

I loved doing the tempo workouts. But that was because our only other option was all-out intervals run at 100% effort (in an attempt to hang with faster teammates).

For me, if the team was running 80% effort on the tempos and I ran 90%, I could hang with them. That was a better experience and gave me more confidence than getting destroyed doing 8x1000 all-out.

But keep in mind, this was largely because I was a) a bad athlete and b) doing it wrong. I don't even blame my coach. I should have known that it is nuts to race every interval like that.

Back in the 80's we did a bunch of progressive runs under Cook at GMU which I like better than straight tempo/threshold work.

Yesterday was a 12k-16k progressive and next Thursday 4k+3k+2×1500 threshold session.

Using both at various times of the year seems to work well.