Trevelyan Harper wrote:
I’d love to know how they change this for competition. I’ve read Jakob saying they do “a lot of 5k pace”.
It would be interesting to see how long they do this for and what kind of workouts to prepare for the event.
The question of when they do "5K pace" work keeps getting brought up.
It's important to note that threshold is not a "pace" but an effort. That effort makes the pace variable based on the distance of the effort. A 30 minute stretch at "threshold" might be 4:40-50/mi for these guys while a set of 1 minute efforts with 30 second rests might get down to 5K pace. Both of these efforts are "threshold" but the paces vary to achieve that effort.
This is specified in the academic paper this article uses as a reference.
"The runners in the present
study do repetitions over distances from 2000 m to
3000 m at this pace. However, when these runners do
repetitions over distances from 1000 m to 400 m with
lactate and heart rate in zone 2 (Table 2) they run at
paces between 10,000 m and 5000 m race. The volume
of a zone 2 session is between 8 and 12 km"