Old School Workouts (i.e., 20x400)

Croze wrote:

Its bread and butter for runners training by the interval/treshold philosophy.

Examples: The ingebrigtsens.

Twice a week they have threshold intervals morning and evening. Something like this:

Monday

AM: 5x6min

PM: 25x400m

Wednesday

AM: 4x6min

PM: 8x1000m

Thread title is "Old School Workouts (i.e., 20x400)"

malmo wrote:

Never did 20x400 in my life and only heard of one person doing it ever. That's an anomaly, not bread and butter.

Bread and butter:

1) 10x400

2) 8-10 x 800

3) 5-6 x 1 mile

4) all sorts of ladders

what pace, what is your 400 ability, what is the recovery, how many sessions of bread and butter per week? at what time of the season?

the 20 x 400 m workout, say at 1500m pace is insane, but if you survive physically and mentally, then you're not going to be afraid of any physical pain, which is the benefit of insane training.

if you're strong mentally, you want to focus on training that makes sense, you do the work that is only enough to provide a response, to adapt and improve.

so, for quality intervals, the question is how much is enough?

as for slower intervals, there is no point, you can just do a 10 mile run up and down hills and run all the hills hard, for much better effect and enjoyment.

for my money, the point of 400m intervals is to develop middle distance speed, that is for the middle distance guy.

for a 100m guy, the 400 is an endurance workout and very valuable at that. i'll skip that idea here.

so, for bread and butter middle distance, you want to run at 800 or mile pace, and volume is four to six, maybe eight, but recovery should be a minute or so, which is to adapt to race pace under fatigue.

that means a centro type guy would do six or eight quarters in 54, but more i'd ask, where's your proof that the extra quarters provide anything but waste energy that is useful tomorrow?

then there is the 800 repeats, perhaps four of them as routine, more for the mental training to deliver under high stress.

that goes one quarter in aerobic threshold and one quarter in desired race finish kick speed.

so for a centro, that would be a 66 second quarter and then a 52 quarter for a 158 800m, and only 3 or 4. in the case of a centro though, there is not much point in doing too much of this type of work, because he has this ability already, and he only wants to do this kind of work to sharpen, to see if he's on top of his game.

a centro wants to figure out the 800m speed endurance better, that is the adaptation he should focus the quality work on.

When I was a freshman, John said 'WE' were going to do 20 x 400 in 65 with 60 second jog. I laughed, no one else did. Needless to say, I couldn't get close to that workout.

Fast forward to my senior year - Dave Taylor and I did 20 x 400 in 62 with a 45 second jog. Note, I'm not a miler, my best was 4:11 and, if I raced that more, maybe 4:06 or so max just because I wasn't fast, but I was really strong. I did run 13:10 for 3 miles indoor less than 2 weeks later.

limitless wrote:

When I was a freshman, John said 'WE' were going to do 20 x 400 in 65 with 60 second jog. I laughed, no one else did. Needless to say, I couldn't get close to that workout.

Fast forward to my senior year - Dave Taylor and I did 20 x 400 in 62 with a 45 second jog. Note, I'm not a miler, my best was 4:11 and, if I raced that more, maybe 4:06 or so max just because I wasn't fast, but I was really strong. I did run 13:10 for 3 miles indoor less than 2 weeks later.

Dam, what were your other prs?

I raced at a pretty high level and modified the 20x440 with a 200m jog recovery to a 3 minute rest after finishing each quarter mile. I raced from 440 to and 440yd hurdles to a mile in the old days. The goal was taking the time of all 440's and gradually reducing the average time of all 20 reps.

It was not the individual time of each 440 as it was to being tied to the distance you wanted to race well at. For example, if you wanted high class half mile or miles, the average was all important...faster the better starting with a cross country base. If you could get them down to 60 second average, you could throw meaningful speed into the workouts to race a quarter mile or speed endurance in the form of 660's to better get high class 880 or mile race times. But the 20x440 was to transition from cross country to track and to be able to race fast, yet get through the heats to the semi finals and still have more to give in the finals.....talking 1960's to 1970's

This is somewhat related. Our high school swim coach in the 70's would make his kids swim to exhaustion and then hose them down with cold water in the showers, have them drink some cold milk, and them have them do it all over again. I have no idea if there isany physiological basis for this, but we had quite a few NYS champions in the 200 and 500 free, and 4x100 free relay.

CoachB wrote:

Stuff like this used to be bread and butter. What are the pros and cons of doing 20x400 for a high school kid? The biggest number of 400s I've ever assigned is 15 (done at closer to 3200 pace) When appropriate, when is it not appropriate?

Accumulate volume at goal pace without the stress of doing it in larger chunks (i.e., 1000s)?

Biomechanical efficiency at goal pace?

Aerobic Development? (if rest is short enough?)

Discus

I've done 16x400 for 5k training, and think it is a bit much for HS unless you have a very talented runner like Ryun. Probably 10x is the upper limit.

Of course depending on pace you could do more although I think for HS distances likely a case of diminishing returns.

The question is, what are you training this kid for?

This was exactly my reasoning as a grad student in Kinesiology in full marathon training circa 1970. Started with 20x440 with 220 break, progressed to 40x440 with 110 break in about 50 sec to keep VO2 high, almost like a very hard tempo run. A 440 break after sets of 10 was a welcome break! I did this every Saturday for a few months, my only track session. No rest before, Mon-Fri was a steady 15 miles at "working effort," 5:45 pace or so. My best average was a little under 71 sec. This was a little faster than my 3 mile PR pace. Result 2:22 and 2:21 marathons. Oh yeah, my best 40x440 session came the weekend after racing a marathon, I recovered very fast in those days.

2:18 wrote:

I was reading a book of a first day college practice. Sorry but it was either Jim Ryan or Dave Waddle. I read about both of them but it was likely Ryan. He talked about throwing up during and after the workout. The claim was 20 x 400. We use to do 16x400. Toughest workout was with Peter Maher at 8xmile on the track. About 11 of us started the workout only 7 finished with all under 5:00. Temp was in the 90's. Results; two weeks later we finished 1-2 at Manitoba Marathon.

According to this article Jim Ryun ran 50 x 400 starting at 69 sec in HS

Mac field?

I'm hoping this can become the official 20x400 thread so we don't have another thread about 20x400. My theory is that Once A Runner is the only reason people care about the 20x400 thread.

Got to agree. Without pace and rest 20x400 says nothing. Coachb must blow as a coach.

Overload wrote:

CoachB wrote:

Stuff like this used to be bread and butter. What are the pros and cons of doing 20x400 for a high school kid? The biggest number of 400s I've ever assigned is 15 (done at closer to 3200 pace) When appropriate, when is it not appropriate?

Accumulate volume at goal pace without the stress of doing it in larger chunks (i.e., 1000s)?

Biomechanical efficiency at goal pace?

Aerobic Development? (if rest is short enough?)

Discus

I've done 16x400 for 5k training, and think it is a bit much for HS unless you have a very talented runner like Ryun. Probably 10x is the upper limit.

Of course depending on pace you could do more although I think for HS distances likely a case of diminishing returns.

The question is, what are you training this kid for?

10x 400 at 5k pace is an upper limit. Are you smoking crack.

Buch better option:

4 x mile @5k pace w/3 min rec. 5 min or so rest. 4 x 400 @just under 1500m pace w/60 rec

If you are looking for speed:

3-4 sets of 300m, 200m, 100m w/100m jog

My team has done 24 x 400 numerous times. Not as uncommon as you may think. Typically at 1-1.5 minutes rest @ 5k-10k pace depending on the time of the season. Meant to be an easy workout to feel the pace and not a ball buster

In college (early 2000s) we did 20x400 once or twice a year. 5k pace, 1 minute jogging/shuffling rest. I loved that workout and was always was within 0.5 secs of goal pace. Just thinking about it wants me to get back into racing shape...

IRunXC wrote:

In college (early 2000s) we did 20x400 once or twice a year. 5k pace, 1 minute jogging/shuffling rest. I loved that workout and was always was within 0.5 secs of goal pace. Just thinking about it wants me to get back into racing shape...

It's funny how typos pop out at you after you post something...