Is a 5 mile tempo too much for track

nice humblebrag. spent the entire post dropping times instead of asking a question.

to come to think of it, that wasn't so humble

sorry, I just wanted to give times to give a bit of context to my tempo times and goals, I meant the dana hills course itself was fast NOT my time, the best guys were running 14:20's.

Jgt11 wrote:

Our coach had us do a 5-mile tempo today and I did it in 28:01, is this too long of a tempo for track season? I'm coming off a 15:12 3-mile(on the Dana Hills course, which is pretty fast) cross season and am going for sub 4:20 1600m and sub 9:20 3200m this year.

Not really. 3-5 mile tempo is about avg when it comes to distance. The run should have been comfortably hard, with some slight muscle stress, but nothing too serious.

Now, had it been a 10 mile tempo run, that would have been an issue.

For your whole team? Probably. For you? Maybe not, if you have decent mileage behind you, you're a senior, and it was a tempo effort...it's a great strength builder. Will give you laps 5,6,7,8 in that 3200. It's a major advantage to walk into college with some bigger aerobic work done.

I see what you're saying with the tempo helping with those middle laps. I'm a Junior but that gives me even more time to build my base for college. Thanks!

In college us 5k/10k guys would do 6, 8, 10 mile “tempo” pace runs regularly.

For to HSers 3-5 mile tempo is pretty common. You likely went faster than your lactate threshold pace for this time of year but feeling good sometimes you gotta roll with it am I right?

PS. You have a damn good coach there at Dana Hills. Listen to him.

I work all my athletes up to a 25min tempo run. I dont have anyone going 5:00/mi pace but some going over 4 miles.

Do you run for Dana?

That wasn't a tempo run.

Winning wrote:

That wasn't a tempo run.

Please explain why not.

No, I don't run for Dana. A lot of Cali teams have started doing the 5-mile tempo to emulate GO/Dana I have learned

hi julian. good job on the race! big improvement from ur 10th grade track prs

Nothing special about a 5 mi run w / decent effort.

Whether or not it serves your purposes depends on you and the track.

hjgkhjgkhjk wrote:

Winning wrote:

That wasn't a tempo run.

Please explain why not.

It was too slow for someone with those prs. Yes it was a hard run, but not a tempo run.

In college I ran a 5 mile tempo every day...that's too hard and does not include enough quantity and variety. If I could go back I would include more variety such as long runs, recovery runs, speed development, speed endurance, strides, fartlek, hills, etc.

(By tempo I mean fast distance. In other words hard-but not all out.)

Winning wrote:

hjgkhjgkhjk wrote:

Please explain why not.

It was too slow for someone with those prs. Yes it was a hard run, but not a tempo run.

I hate to sound negative, but the degree of wrongness in your comment is surprising.

3 miles in 15:12 = VDOT of 65.6.

Daniels Threshold pace = 5:30

Since this is a longer tempo run, according to Daniels 2nd ed. p. 112, he'd want to add ~6 seconds/mile to a tempo run of this length.

5 miles in 28:01 = 5:36.2/mile, which is the pace Daniels recommends almost to a tenth of a second.

And above all, a good tempo run does not mean hitting an exact pace. Running slower would have been perfectly fine, if that's the appropriate degree of effort for the day.

I don’t know. I have literally only completed one 5 mile tempo in my life at goal pace, and it felt like a race. For reference, I’ve broken 14 and the best 5 mile tempo I did was just under 25:00. I thrive off something like 12x1k

Obviously you're running pretty well which is why you wrote all that useless information at the end. Seems like your coach knows what they're doing and you should continue to listen to them.