Alternatives to interval workouts on the track?

Run intervals on the road, measure it out on mapmyrun or some shit. New stimulus, also trying running intervals based on time instead of distance on the roads or trails.

What about hill reps?

fartleks on the road. intervals on the road. tempos on the road. get a GPS watch and use it. the one i have allows me to set up a workout before (10x400 w/60s recovery for example) and i think it's a common feature in GPS watches now too.

do hill repeats by running hard up and steady down.

there's a golf course near my house with a 2 mile wood chip path around it that i run a lot of workouts on. i agree it's a good idea to get off the track, especially if you aren't racing much on the track.

Find a park or some good trails. Run some different courses so you get rough distances, and do your interval workouts there. Exact distances don't necessarily matter, you can try to beat your best on that course.

Interval session can be down that path, turn, round that three and to that far tree, jog back recovery. Might be dirt, grass, hard path and other different surfaces there too. Run it backwards some days, use the prevailing wind.

a good one, if in a good hilly area, would be to do 12-16x running as hard as you can up the hills and just chilling on the downs and flats for a few miles. I have a nice 4mile run where there are 60m hills all the way to half mile hills and I hammer the hills.

How about a marathon on a track?

If all you're motivated to do is 200's at mile rp, then you're just plain lazy. How can you even call that a workout?

Seriously you need to ask?

I'm the same way. I can tolerate 200m-400m intervals on a track, but that's about it. If you are training for track, you should do workouts on a track so you can practice pacing.

I don't feel it is as important if you are training for road races, especially marathons. For me, if I am training for a marathon, I think it is better to do workouts on the road/trail. You can do fartleks or intervals if you know the distance.

Another option is the treadmill. Not good for every workout, but on days when I am not super motivated or the weather outside is horrible, I will run workouts on the treadmill. You can set the pace and force yourself to run it. That can be good or bad depending how you look at it.

The standard Daniels VO2max workout is repeats of 3-5 minutes at about 3k race pace with full recovery. So run repeats of 3-5 minutes at about 3k race pace effort. Anywhere.

This is what you can do:

short and steep hill rep that takes you 1 min to the top at max speed is like 1 min running max speed around the track

You can take this approach to the 1:30 range on a slightly less steep hill and that's like doing 1:30 around the track.

The longer your hill rep in duration the less of a slope on the hill is ideal to try to replicate the max effort.

Get it?

Max 200 effort on hill is extremely steep compared to a max 1600 effort on a hill. The prior is short and steep and the latter is long and gradual.

This is to avoid any uphill injury, like a calf strain.

The point of intervals is to practice running fast not hard.

If you cannot get yourself to do intervals on the track you are running reps that are either too fast or too long for your current condition. You need to figure out your interval pace/distance based on what you can run that day, not what you can do in a race after peaking for a week.

If you want to practice running hard, find a race.

You can do the vast majority of your training off track, especially if you're focusing the racing cross country or roads. Just use do fartleks with perceived exertion and time.

This isn't, however, a complete solution to your problem.

You mention a lack of motivation to do hard workouts on the track. You're likely to lack the same motivation on the roads. You just won't know that you're not going as fast. This isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes the knowledge that you're not hitting your paces on the track is so demoralizing that you end up not getting in much of a workout at all, whereas if you're just going by perceived exertion, you might be going to slow, but at least you'll get in some solid volume. Also, going a bit slower in your workouts for much of the year is a good way to stay relatively fit, avoid injury, and prevent an early peak.

Ultimately, however, if you really want to race well, you're going to have to find a way to push yourself harder during the last 4-6 weeks before your peak races. You need that really hard finishing work to maximize your physiological and psychological fitness. (A big piece of the puzzle is getting familiar with pain and developing the motivation to push yourself through it.) You don't necessarily have to do this work on the track if you won't be racing on the track, but you have to figure out some way to get that work done.

I'd suggest 2 options. The first is to get training partners. Almost everyone runs harder in a group. By taking turns leading (or just following the strongest guy), you can get pulled to times you wouldn't hit alone.

The second option is to use lots of tune up races. This only really works if you're doing shorter races. If your peak race is a 5k, though, you can do 4 5k road races in the 6 weeks leading up to your goal race, and that should get you pretty sharp.

I do almost all my vo2 type work on the roads - just set up my gps watch and go. Times mean less because of hills, but since I am mostly a road racer, doing a 1000 with a hill in the middle is a boon.

800 dude mostly nailed it.

But you should also stop associating the track with die hard puking efforts. Check out the 2 kind of runners thread where Cabral outlines Mamede's training. For example, run 500's at 10k speed with 100m active jogs. Finish off with some faster fun work, say 4x200 at mile speed. This is excellent for threshold development and speed maintenance during base and it will make you think differently of track training.

Stephenseagull wrote:

How about a marathon on a track?

better a marathon around your toilet.