Let's Run Some Intervals

After about five years of running, I’ve finally zeroed in on the perfect training stimulus for myself.  Here’s what I do:

  1) Find a quiet stretch of road that takes about 5-7 minutes to run at “full speed”.

  2) Warm up by jogging to that stretch of road (about half a mile away from home), then running the first interval at about 80% effort, with some short sprints thrown in.

  3) Recovery walk of about 5 minutes (which conveniently completes a lap and gets me back to the start of the quiet stretch of road.
  4) Run as fast as I possibly can sustain for the length of the road.  Target heart rate >90% of max on average, increasing to >95% at the end (for me, that’s 190+, sometimes approaching 200).  It needs to be intense enough to divert all available blood to the leg muscles to maintain the effort.
  5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 for a total of 3 intervals.  Keep track of the slowest of the three intervals for future reference.  This also encourages consistency instead of having one spectacular interval at the cost of the other reps.

I've been doing this about 3 times a month.  Physiologically, this establishes the conditions for maximal oxygen use by the leg muscles, which encourages growth of blood vessels and mitochondria and any other infrastructure that is needed for efficient energy production.  All this infrastructure greatly improves performance on longer, slower runs.

Suddenly, I’m noticing that my heart rate is dropping for a given pace on a normal run, and it’s much easier to do long runs with fewer walk breaks.  All those benefits you’re supposed to get from running lots of miles only happen for me when regular speed work is included.  Now I know.