The Workout

20x200m at goal 1500m/mile pace with 200m jog recovery

The Why

This workout offers a lot of volume at goal race pace. With 2.5 miles of 1500m/mile race pace it gives an athlete plenty of opportunity to build economy at a new pace while keeping the reps short enough that the session isn’t overwhelming.

Despite the pace, this workout is predominantly aerobic. The 200m recovery jog is roughly 1:2 work to rest ratio, this keeps the workout from getting too glycolytic/acidic. This makes it a good choice early in the season when we’re first learning new paces and building into more race specific workouts as the season progresses.

For a lot of our middle-distance athletes, this session can act much like a tempo. The average pace of the workout for most of our men’s team is about 6:00-6:20 per mile. Each rep let’s blood acidity inch up slightly and let’s athletes spend the 200m jog learning to clear it out. Research has shown that at rest about half of lactate is removed through oxidation, however, running at moderate intensities (50-75% VO2Max) lactate is used by the active cell as a source of fuel (Brooks, 2009).

In a The Track and Field Performance Podcast you can hear Furman University’s Chris Neal, talk about how their athletes do a similar session alternating between 30s reps with 50s recoveries for their more elite athletes. In fact, Steve Prefontaine have been known to do a version of this usually called 30/40’s where the reps are done in 30 seconds and the recoveries are run in 40 seconds. This is a substantially harder workout than simply saying 200m jog, but it’s a great way to make the workout more specific and get in a great tempo effort out of it, after all he would averaging 4:40 pace for 5 miles.

This workout is usually done early in our indoor season when we’re establishing new paces and trying to get athletes comfortable with faster running in smaller doses. Workouts like this pave the way for longer reps with less total volume.

We think of a workout like this as building the pieces and only later we will worry about learning how to put those pieces together – There are no medals for who can run the most 200’s in 30s, but there’s usually one for someone who can do 8 of them in a row with no break.