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July 13, 2000

The Run Around

20-minute workout helps runners develop pacing

By Matt Carpenter

It’s a simple enough concept: To race fast, we must train fast. The hard part is figuring out what workout to do for the fast training.

There are so many workouts and training schedules to choose from, it’s almost mind boggling. A quick glance at a few months worth of covers from a popular running magazine does not simplify the issue: five ways to run faster, 10 ways to make every run great, run your best race ever. What’s important is to pick a workout or two you like and stick with the program. I call these core workouts.

One of my favorite core workouts is one that’s adaptable for most runners and easy to incorporate. After a good warm-up with a few strides, simply run for 20 minutes, alternating between one minute hard and one minute easy.

The major goal: You want all 10 of the hard minutes to be of the same quality. If your last few hard minutes get slower or feel a whole lot harder, that’s a sign you may have gone too hard on the first few.

One way to help keep the quality even on the hard minutes is to adjust the easy minutes. If you are not recovering on the easy minutes, it’s OK to slow them down or even walk them — whatever it takes so you can recover for the next hard minute. With time, you will learn exactly what paces you need to do to even out the workout.

It’s all about pacing. Pacing is also the essence of racing. A race is not won by the fastest runner, but by the runner who slows down the least. It’s true. It’s easy to beat someone who is much faster than you if they go out too hard and die a lactic-acid death.

The workout has several other benefits:

  • You can do it almost anywhere. This is great for those who don’t like to go to a track or who don’t have easy access to one. This also makes it perfect for quality workouts for trail or mountain running.

  • It’s hard to overtrain doing this workout. Unlike a rigid track workout that tends to make you race, this one adjusts to how you are feeling on a particular day.

    The next time you want to learn about pacing, try the “one-on, one-off” workout. Your only guide is effort.

    Learning to run by effort is the key to racing faster.

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