is 25 minutes of tempo work a week enough?

25 minutes is plenty. 20 minutes would be sufficient, actually. Upper end work is like nitro glycerin. A little goes a long way.

Is that upper end aerobic work or upper end anaerobic work?

If the tempo runs are done at the proper effort can't they be done pretty much as often as you want and for as long as you want?

It is my understanding that it is the anaerobic work that breaks you down not the aerobic work.

25 minutes of Tempo running per week seems pretty anemic when the goal is to run for 3 hours at a similar pace.

What say you?

If by "tempo work" you mean Daniels LT pace, then 25 minutes is fine, as that's a pretty hard run.

If you mean tempo in the more general sense of sustained running at faster speeds (probably equal to or faster than marathon pace), then you would probably want to do more. There's as much art as science to mixing training stimuli. Far too many runners divide their training into "workouts," which are hard and require one to hit exact paces, and "miles" which can be as slow and easy as one wants. Especially in the earlier portion of a training cycle, it makes sense to try to do a lot of one's mileage within 30 seconds per mile of marathon pace, with frequent progressions at the end of one's runs. It's only as you get closer to competition and your workouts start getting brutal that it becomes necessary and advisable to really back off the intensity in daily runs.

Believe Daniels says a max of 10% of weekly mileage can be tempo pace. So if you are running ~40 MPW you probably are at the upper recommended limit.

Thanks for the replies. Some more details. I run 50mpw with a marathon PR of 3:10, trying to get it down to 3:05 and then sub 3 eventually. HM PR is 1:24 (easy course though). I tend to do tempo runs at in the 6:30s or so, so about 30-40 seconds faster than MP. I would suppose this puts me in anaerobic territory.

wwwwwwwww wrote:

Thanks for the replies. Some more details. I run 50mpw with a marathon PR of 3:10, trying to get it down to 3:05 and then sub 3 eventually. HM PR is 1:24 (easy course though). I tend to do tempo runs at in the 6:30s or so, so about 30-40 seconds faster than MP. I would suppose this puts me in anaerobic territory.

No, you are not in anaerobic territory. It sounds like you are running at a pace which is pretty close to what Daniels defines as LT.....seems like you are pretty close to HM pace. That, or even a little faster, would be fine for a 20-25 min tempo run.

However, since your goal is a faster marathon, you should probably include longer runs at paces that are close to marathon goal pace.

If your half PR is 1:24, that's about 6:25ish pace. You should be running your tempos at at least this pace if not a few sec per mile faster. Also, regardless of the course, a 1:24 suggests a much faster marathon than 3:10 or even 3:05.

I'd figure out a way to get your mileage up to at least 60. Good luck!

ok thanks, I'm going to try to get up to 60 a week and then continue this little tempo runs once a week.