Breaking the Mold Without Breaking the Progression

I’ve written two articles already on progressions for milers (Part 1 & Part 2). This could be considered part 2.5

In both of those, I laid workouts that follow simple and predictable progressions that get progressively more challenging. But what happens when you feel like you need to add variety but don’t want to break the progression you’ve built? That’s one of the biggest challenges in designing training plans: We respond well to variety and novel stimuli, but too much variety makes progression much less predictable.

A Practical Example

Over the last few months I’ve been training for a mile. I’m not my favorite athlete to coach, but occasionally I have a good idea. Below are a few mile specific workouts that I’ve run leading up to the workout that I want to discuss.

20x200m at 35 w/ 200m (~65s) jog
3 Mile tempo + 6x400m at 70 w/ 2:00 rest
2 sets (600m at 1:45 + 5x200m at 35 w/ 60s rest) [5:00 between sets]

The first workout is covered exactly in my first article on this. It allows us to spend a lot of time at goal race pace and is broken up into small enough pieces for the workout to be manageable.

In the second workout, the focus is on the 400’s at mile pace. The pacing is a little ahead of what I’ve run this season, but only a small step up from the last time I did this workout using five 400m reps. The longer reps put a much bigger demand on the physiology needed to hold our race pace.

Finally, the 600m+200m reps already break the mold slightly by having a longer rep to need to adapt to by stringing together what we’ve already built. That’s followed by some 200’s after we’ve built up some fatigue and need to learn how to run through just like in a race, but with a little more control.

Where Do We Go From Here?

By this point in the season I felt like I was handling 200’s without difficulty and had no issues running faster or shortening rest. I also took a big down week dealing with an injury the week before so 400’s or 600’s felt like a reach as a first or second workout back. What’s the best way to still take a step forward if I’m caught between two progressions and neither seems like the right fit? Here’s what I reached for:

2 mile tempo + 2 sets (5x300m at 52 w/ 60s rest) [4:00 between sets]

This session leads off with a tempo. Part of this was to gauge if I was ready to do a proper workout after an injury, but with the season winding down, I also just needed to fit in some aerobic work and didn’t want to dedicate a full session to it.

It’s the 300’s that are the focus here. 300’s are obviously a halfway point between 200’s and 400’s. So no overload there. They were also targeting the same 4:40 mile pace as the other workouts I listed. Again, no overload. So how is this workout taking a step forward? What part of this workout is driving improvement?

The tool I decided to reach for was density. When we look at workouts, we usually look at things like total volume, rest, rep distance, paces, etc. but we can use an easy metric like work to rest ratio (time spent running fast divided by time spent recovering) to give us an idea of how dense our session is.

Let’s look at the three sessions I mentioned above and the one that’s I just ran in this section:

20x200m at 35 w/ 200m (~65s) jog

700s active time

1,235s resting time

0.57 work to rest ratio

Tempo + 6x400m at 70 w/ 2:00 rest

420s active time

600s resting time

0.70 work to rest ratio

2 sets (600m at 1:45 + 5x200m at 35 w/ 60s rest) w/ 5:00 rest

560s active time

900s resting time

0.62 work to rest ratio

Tempo + 2 sets (5x300m at 52 w/ 60s rest) w/ 4:00 rest

520s active time

720s resting time

0.72 work to rest ratio

This workout has the highest work to rest ratio that I’ve done in these pace ranges so far. 6x400m is certainly very close, but if we look at the per set ratio (i.e. one set of 5x300m) then we would really be looking at a work to rest ratio of 1.08 which dwarfs every other workout so far. Even a single, isolated set of (600m+5x200m) falls at 0.93.

By using sets we can make a brief block of very dense training within a session as long as we include a longer recovery in between those sets to be able to bounce back from the harder effort. This can be a great precursor to longer, continuous reps especially when running more anaerobic paces.

As the season progresses, utilizing sets to overload blocks of higher density is a great way to put the pieces together. Races are essentially one set of X meters with no seconds rest so short of using continuous reps, we can get much closer to race-like conditions by stitching together a limited number of reps with short rest and using a long recovery between sets to ensure we can handle the overall workload.