Training for amateur 400m race

bump

Considering you are only running 2 miles each week (if that) then the best thing you can do is just simply to run more. Build up to running 15 miles each week over the course of the next couple of months and it wouldn’t surprise me if this got you in the mid to high 60s instantly. Dropping from 75 to 67.5 is going to be easier than dropping from 67.5 to 60.0, doing the latter will take sintervals at paces tailored for your capabilities but it is a good idea to build your fitness (base) up first before you start doing any crazy interval sessions to avoid injury.

Build up to running 3 miles a day at 7:30 ish pace. This will give you aerobic conditioning. If you need to do this at 8+ pace right now then that’s fine, you’ll gain the fitness pretty fast anyway. After a couple of months of this start adding sprints in. Maybe 100s, 150s and 200s at fast paces.

No. This guy has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Don't listen to him.

The 400m is a sprint event and as such the limit to your performance will be your 60m speed. The best way to improve your 400m time is to improve your speed reserve which means improving your speed. That means improving your 60m dash.

So start with distances as short as 30m (or even 10m). Sprint them all out, between intervals give 1 min rest for every 10m you sprint. Don't go overboard with sprint intervals, they are meant to only be done 2-3 times a week spaced out with 1-2 days of tempo work in between (tempo work = 100-200 meters at approx 75% speed with 2-3 min rest in between). And don't do too many short intervals. 4-6 is plenty.

As you get faster at 30m, begin adding 40m intervals, then 50m intervals, then 60m intervals (remembering to keep the 1 min rest per 10m rule). Occasionally add intervals over 60m to your training like running a 100-200m all out (taking 10-20min of rest). Never do more than 540m total of intervals in a single training session though (and don't max out on volume very often, the shorter workouts are the ones you are going to get the most benefit from).

Get your 100m below 12.4 seconds (very achievable if you train properly the way I told you to) and you'll be able to win the bet without doing any lactate work at all.

But if you need the lactate work because your speed isn't cutting it do it no more than once a week and give yourself 2 days complete rest following it. Lactate work would look like 3 x150 with 3 mins rest in between each.

Don't listen to any distance runner on this forum that tells you to do distance work. The 400m is a sprint not a distance event. Very little of it is aerobic.

Good luck

Lmao okay, try doing zero aerobic work and being in awful aerobic shape and racing a 400 and see how it works out ??

Rasa wrote:

Lmao okay, try doing zero aerobic work and being in awful aerobic shape and racing a 400 and see how it works out ??

He's right, you're wrong. The aerobic threshold is ~385y, which means that about 80% of the 400 could be done, in theory, at full sprint.

Anyway, a 10.00 second guy who has done minimal distance training is going to do better at a 400 than a 30:00 10k runner. So the ideal training plan would be a mix of both, what Clyde Hart calls sprint endurance. I'd recommend an analogue of this, which is a mix of Clyde Hart (Baylor; Michael Johnson, Jeremy Wariner, etc.) and Mark Guthrie (UW-Lacrosse; Andrew Rock, and a whole host of slow scrubs he coached to low 47s).

Monday: 1 mile run warm up, striders, 100-200-300-200-100 pyramid @ 80%, 5 minute rest (Optional lifting: deadlifts)

Tuesday: 1 mile run warm up, striders, hill sprints/stairs @ 75%, reps until exhaustion

Wednesday: 1 mile run warm up, striders, 10x200 @70-75%, walk next 200m, start over again (Optional lifting: med ball box jump, plyo)

Thursday: 1 mile run warm up, striders, 2x300 @ 90-95%, 5 minute rest

Friday: 1 mile run warm up, striders, 10x60 starts accelerating to full speed (Optional lifting: back squats, leg presses, plyo)

Saturday: 20-30 minute run, pace doesn't matter, just finish it

Sunday: Rest, maybe do some kind of cross training like basketball or tennis

Eat right, lots of stretching (consider a yoga class or two), lots of water. This will drop your time like crazy, and make your ass/calves like steel.

Source: former A-A 200m and 400m runner

Clyde Hart's training methods are outdated tbh. Sure he coached Michael Johnson who was the 400m WR at the time but there have been advancements in 400m training methods since then and you can find coaches like Tony Holler who train the 400m more optimally now a days.

For instance, no sprinter should be doing a mile warm up that's ridiculous. Deadlifts are going to do very little to improve your 400m (although in my personal experience front squats help with mechanics in the last 100m of the race but weights in general are not the biggest factor in influencing your 400m time).

OP needs to first start working on his max velocity and building a decent speed reserve from the ground up. As long as his 100m is over 14 seconds he essentially 0 chance of breaking 60 secs.

I guess 100m over 15 secs makes it impossible to run sub 60 sec. You could run a sub 60 sec with a 14 sec 100m if you capped speed endurance and lactate tolerance I suppose.

I'll caveat my advice in that I was as close to a pure 400m guy as could be; my 400 converted to dec points was far, far superior to my 200. I'm 6'5" and getting the train going so to speak wasn't in the cards for the shorter distances.

Disagree with you w/r/t the mile warmup, but not a big deal. I think you're underestimating how much he's going to need some reserve in the last 100m, but that could be my training with Hart's plan as the base.

Either way, OP, the message is this: worry about speed first. To break 60, I think you have to be at least sub-13 in the 100 and sub-27 in the 200, and even that isn't giving you much to spare.

clyde heart wrote:

I'll caveat my advice in that I was as close to a pure 400m guy as could be; my 400 converted to dec points was far, far superior to my 200. I'm 6'5" and getting the train going so to speak wasn't in the cards for the shorter distances.

Disagree with you w/r/t the mile warmup, but not a big deal. I think you're underestimating how much he's going to need some reserve in the last 100m, but that could be my training with Hart's plan as the base.

Either way, OP, the message is this: worry about speed first. To break 60, I think you have to be at least sub-13 in the 100 and sub-27 in the 200, and even that isn't giving you much to spare.

I'm curious during what years were you competing and being coached? A lot of what you're saying is the old school way of thinking when it comes to training the 400m including the warm ups. Were you a Baylor runner who trained under Hart himself?

I really think Clyde Hart is a very overrated coach to be completely honest with you. His methods are objectively worse than what most of the new school short to long/low volume high intensity sprint coaches are teaching now a days. I think I can say this without much bias because I've trained both ways under coaches who subscribe to both types of philosophies. Hart's is simply worse and relies on the athlete having a certain amount of innate speed. And even if you do have innate speed Tony Holler's method will still work better for you.

I predicted the 400m WR would be broken a couple of years before Wayde did it (and think it will be lowered again) because the training for the event had not been optimized from what I could see.

The faster your max velocity the easier sub max velocity will feel.

Could be! I ran in the mid-2000s. I actually wasn't even a track recruit, I was a walk-on/bench scrub on the soccer team who got brought over to the track team after the sprint asst. coach grabbed me after practice. Didn't run in high school. I can definitely believe what was taught then is out of date, but it worked for me - I basically went from ex-soccer player to low-48 in five months.

Rasa wrote:

Lmao okay, try doing zero aerobic work and being in awful aerobic shape and racing a 400 and see how it works out ??

Tried it. Ran sub 50 so I'd say it works out pretty well.

Of course you could come back at me and say "well prove that you can run sub 50 to me, I don't know you! You could be a liar anonymous person on the internet!! Blah blah."

But I don't really need to prove anything to you. All the proof you need is already there out in the open if you just payed attention. Look at the history of the 400m. How many of the very best 400m runners double the 400 with the 200 as opposed to the 800?

Christian Coleman split a 44 second 400m on a 4 x4. Do you really think Christian Coleman does any high millage aerobic work like you are suggesting?

Michael Norman ran 43.45. He is trained by Caryl Gilbert-Smith whose program consists of high intensity low volume. She is not having Michael Norman go out and run cross country and do a bunch of high millage work.

Here is a little math for you, 15 secs x 4 is 60 secs. 14 x4 is 56 secs. How about YOU try holding your 100m PR pace for 400m and YOU see how it works out. If OPs 100m does not get bellow 14 secs at least it does not matter AT ALL how many miles he can run, how fit he is, or what his aerobic base is he WILL NOT break 60 secs.

clyde heart wrote:

Could be! I ran in the mid-2000s. I actually wasn't even a track recruit, I was a walk-on/bench scrub on the soccer team who got brought over to the track team after the sprint asst. coach grabbed me after practice. Didn't run in high school. I can definitely believe what was taught then is out of date, but it worked for me - I basically went from ex-soccer player to low-48 in five months.

Yeah mid-2000s sounds about right. The culture and philosophy is changing slowly. It is often the people who have the most talent who have the hardest time seeing how bad some training programs actually are because they still succeeding with them (case in point Noah Lyles). I could run sub 11 even with a long to short program that involved absurd amounts of volume and very little actual speed work. But it still didn't mean that I was optimizing my talent by training this way.

clyde heart, I am confident that if you had a more optimized training program you would have run better than low 48.

Poisonous fish wrote:

If OPs 100m does not get bellow 14 secs at least it does not matter AT ALL how many miles he can run, how fit he is, or what his aerobic base is he WILL NOT break 60 secs.

Just for clarification, me saying you need a sub 14 sec 100 for a sub 60 400m is mostly just me theorizing about what could be theoretically physically possible. Realistically you really need a 12.5 or lower 100m for a sub 60 400m. Get a sub 12 100m and I doubt your 400m would be over 60 seconds no matter how little lactate work you have done.

15 mpw is not high mileage lol.

I never said mileage alone would get a person there (because it won’t) but the matter of the fact is, most people need a combination of speed, speed endurance and endurance training to run a good 400. If a person is totally 100% untrained and out of condition then they will need to build up their endurance in order to actually handle the speed endurance workouts both cardio-wise and so their bodies can handle the sprint workouts without injury. Going straight from sedentary to training like a teenage track athlete busting out 40m repeats at speeds OP is clearly not used to is a recipe for injury, tenchnique, strength and actually learning HOW to run (by spending time on your feet and getting used to running) is best to be built before anything. Slow and steady is best when first starting out AS A SEDENTARY ADULT. I would run at a moderate pace and stride(form drills) for a few months and maybe lift weights if I was OP and THEN ease into the PURE SPEED training, his body would be better prepared for it that way.

And anyone who needs to run 12.5 to get a sub 60 is seriously lacking endurance. Most people in any sort of shape could get a 59 point on 13 mid/high speed.

The 400 is not like the 100 or 200, it requires SOME conditioning and I find a lot of 400 runners completely neglect this and find themselves stuck at a certain time, constantly trying to improve theor maximum power in a futile effort to knock the seconds off where the truth is, they’ve already mazed out their speed but could actually knock 2-3 seconds off their already trained times by focusing on enduramce while maintaining speed ... but alas never try/train that way so therefore end up mediocre when they could have been good.

I don’t need or what you to prove your prs to me, I don’t care. I am an 800 runner for reference. I KNOW pure speed is important and you aren’t getting anywhere without developing it ... but building stamina and preventing injury is also important when you first start out from a completely untrained background.

Still wrong.

If OP is worried about injuries he should reduce the sprint distance by even more. That's why I suggested start with a distance maybe as short as a 10m sprint. How many people do you know pull hamstrings doing a 10m sprint? It is usually near or nearing max velocity that you see sprinting injuries and if OP is not even running sub 13 or sub 12 he is probably too slow to be at a very high risk for injuries like this. You need to build a base for sprinting by actually working on sprinting and various other technical drills and skill building drills (low impact plyos, bounds, etc.) not by doing aerobic endurance runs.

Doing tempo at 75% for a couple of intervals (not tons) alternating days with short 10m sprints to build up a speed base is the OP's best bet at not getting injured.

15 mpw is high millage for a sprinter. I don't really care what it is for distance runners.

"constantly trying to improve theor maximum power in a futile effort to knock the seconds off where the truth is, they’ve already mazed out their speed but could actually knock 2-3 seconds off their already trained times by focusing on enduramce while maintaining speed ... but alas never try/train that way so therefore end up mediocre when they could have been good."

This is not really true. If you run a 10 second 100m and run a sub 44 second 400m you have already capped off your speed endurance/lactate tolerance. You have not capped your speed. If you run a 12 second 100m and are running 55 seconds then you could improve your time by training speed endurance/ lactate tolerance but you could also improve your 100m by even more and see an improvement in your 400m. Your speed will always set the limit for what your 400m time can be and you can work within that limit by improving speed endurance and lactate tolerance.

Oh so you're a 800m runner? So then you must realize that most 200m runners are better at the 400m than you and more knowledgeable about training it and sprinting in general right? Seems like a pretty good time to sit down, shut up and become more educated.

Poisonous fish wrote:

Oh so you're a 800m runner? So then you must realize that most 200m runners are better at the 400m than you and more knowledgeable about training it and sprinting in general right? Seems like a pretty good time to sit down, shut up and become more educated.

Alright, I'm sorry if this came across a bit too harshly when I said it. But the idea that you need to do tons of aerobic "base work" and build a bunch of endurance to survive sprint workouts and not get injured doing speed work is one of the stupidest myths about sprint training and I hate seeing it perpetuated like this. Building an aerobic base does not guard against injuries for speed work. It's just not true. Building speed progressions properly guards against injuries when sprinting.

OP will just be wasting his time if he spends months doing 3 mile runs and aerobic work.

It seems like i would have to run far less volume than i thought.

To recap:

- 2/3 times a week: short intervals ranging from 30m (starting out) to 60m (later on) , totalling 540m maximum

- 1/2 times a week in between interval sessions: tempo work 100-200m at 75% speed

- only if needed to break 60: lactate work (3x150) with 2 days rest after

Thank you for all the responses!

pretty simple. 3 X week do 5 X 300 m run throughs until you can get them down to 42 seconds.

Then push it up to 4 X week 5 X 300 trying to hit 40.

Walk 100 m recovery. Concentrate on good form.

You'll reach the sub 60 easy.