When you think of endurance training, you probably think of long, slow runs lasting for hours and hours, hoping that all this time will help you to reach your goals. This could be training for a competition, a friendly race or just training to look and feel your best. While this type of training can work, I am going to argue that in the end, there are better methods for producing the same (if not better) results, with much less time put in on your part. Let’s start with training for competition: if your goal is to go out and run a race, especially a long distance race, you may train by working on running the longest time possible. Take a marathon, a distance of 26.2 miles. You start running miles and miles each week to build up you stamina, and try to run even further than 26.2 miles in your training. What you are doing however, is training your body to run a very long distance at a set pace. If this is a competition, however, your goal should be to run exactly 26.2 miles, at a very fast pace. Whatever the distance for a competition, you should not be concerned with running one foot more than you have to, but rather, running the predetermined distance while keeping the fastest pace that you can. What about when you’re just running a race for fun? Well, in this case, your goal is still to finish the race, and I doubt there are many people that want to spend more time preparing for a friendly race than needed. Also, while you may not need to run the race at your fastest pace, the better your body can handle running at a fast rate, the easier it will be to run at the pace you will be running on race day. As for those of us that just want to look and feel our best, we must determine what exactly we hope long, slow distances will provide so that we can achieve these goals. Calories burned? Increased cardiovascular endurance? Lower heart rate? Lower blood pressure? Well, these too can be achieved in a shorter time, and with better results.
So, if long, slow distance running is not the answer, what is? Well, as I’m sure some of you have already guessed, interval training is the way to go. Before I get going, I would like to say that if you love running, and long, slow distance is your thing, go for it. The only thing that I would caution is that with excessive running, there are always risks for overuse injuries, but just keep those running shoes fresh (or try out barefoot running) and listen to your body and you should be good. Also, as I will explain later, if you are doing this as training for an event, I would recommend using intervals as a supplement to your training. For those of you that engage in long, slow distance because you think it is the only way to train, or think that there is a fat-burning zone that you want to stay in, then it might be time to try something new. If you haven’t read “5 Keys to Weight Loss”, go check it out and it will explain why interval training is the way to go if you are lose weight. For the remainder of this article, I will focus instead on how interval training can be used to help in long distance performance.
For this type of training, intervals are crucial. As I said before, just because you can run 50 miles at an 8 minute/mile pace does not mean that you will turn that into 25 miles at a 7 or 6 minute/mile pace. This is because your body has not adapted to running at these faster paces. What it comes down to is something called the anaerobic threshold. This is the point where your body can no longer use only oxygen to power the muscles, meaning that you must go to other energy sources. Unfortunately, these other energy sources cannot sustain you for very long. So the goal in training then is to push this anaerobic threshold as high as we can, therefore allowing us to work at higher intensities while still using oxygen as our primary source in muscle activity. This means that now our 8 minute/mile can become a 7 minute/mile, because our body can work in an aerobic state even at this faster pace. With this said, the only way to produce these results is to train at higher levels of intensity, and here is where we start with intervals.
There are two main types of intervals: short bursts of exertion followed by rest periods that are longer than the amount of time we spent working, and longer durations of hard work that will be followed by rest periods shorter than the time spent working. To better explain, let’s take the first type. This would be equivalent to wind sprints. They are very short, but you exert every last ounce of energy to complete them. A wind sprint could last for 15 seconds, but you will probably need to recover for 30 or 60 seconds, especially if you really went all out. On the other hand, if you ran a mile as fast as you could, it would probably take 5-8 minutes to complete, and you would be more than recovered after 2-4 minutes of rest. Within these types of training, there is much room for variations in the intensity, time, and work-to-rest ratio, all which factor into how hard the training is, and how it affects you. The way I like to train is with some of each. With sprints, it is most efficient if you have a heart rate monitor, but timing it out works too. Let’s say you go as hard as you can for 30 seconds. If you have a heart rate monitor, you can wait until your HR drops to 120 and go again. Otherwise, start with a 2 minute recovery, and if you feel that you are fully recovered by the end, try taking off 15 seconds the next time you go out. This type of training is making you work in an anaerobic state and push yourself to the limits, resulting in an increase in your maximum ability to do work. In turn, you will help raise your anaerobic threshold, which is a percentage of that max. So if your max was a 5 minute/mile, and realistically you ran that at 70% or a 7:08 minute/mile, you may have now pushed that max to a 4:30 minute/mile, resulting in a 6:26 minute mile at 70%. You just dropped over 30 seconds off of your time only focusing on increasing you max.
The other part of this is the longer intervals. Here I would run a mile as fast as I could and then let myself recover. You may just want to start with 2 intervals, but try to add in more as you continue to train. Also, you will want to work on decreasing your rest in-between intervals as you adapt to the exercise. If you have a heart rate monitor, use the 120 bpm mark again (your HR will begin to recover more quickly as you become more fit), or if you are just timing yourself, start by recovering for half the time it took you to complete the mile, and then take off 30 seconds every few weeks. Just make sure that you are able to recover enough so that the next mile can be run at a similar pace as the last. With this type of training, we are teaching the body to perform right at the threshold. Exercises is all about adaptation, so as we work on our mile runs, we are adapting to working at the pace that we will eventually want to maintain, and we are also maximizing our bodies’ ability to efficiently consume and utilize oxygen.
With these two types of training, whether you are a competitive athlete or just want to go out and run an event, you will in the end be able to run faster, or run longer with more ease. As far as long, slow distance running, don’t leave it out of the routine, since your body needs to adapt to the act of running for such long distances, but from a cardiovascular standpoint, interval training is the way to go (plus it takes much less time!). Good luck with your training, and I hope to see you out on the track!
-Colin
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