At this weekend’s London Grand Prix, Mo Farah was aiming to break Dave Moorcroft’s long-held British 5000m record. Moorcroft had a successful background in middle distance running, winning the 1500m at the Commonwealth Games. However, the British abundance of talent in these events in the early 80s led him to move up to 5000m. On a balmy night in Oslo in 1982, Moorcroft smashed the world record and almost ran the first sub 13 minute 5000m.

And he still holds the British record 27 years later – why?

To run a world class 5k, you need speed. At world record pace, the runners are almost running at 4 minute mile pace – for over 3 miles!! To enable them to maintain such a pace, they also have to be capable of running very economically and to have a very high lactate threshold speed.

So how does this relate to training for club athletes?

For most club runners, the 5k is at the short end of their range of distances. In order to prepare to race, you need to include sessions at current and goal 5k pace. If you haven’t recently run a 5k, you could convert another recent race time over a longer distance to give you an idea of goal time. However, many road runners’ times do not convert particularly well over shorter distances so an ideal session to gain an idea of your likely race time is one devised by Babineau and Leger, two Canadians. When rested and following a thorough warm up, run 3 x 1600m intervals at the fastest consistent speed you can manage throughout the three. You take one minute recovery between each interval. The average time of the three intervals will be your pace for the 5k.

Another session that Babineau and Leger experimented with was 12 x 400m with 15 seconds rest. They found that the average speed during this session was 3.7% faster than 5k speed. The lactate levels generated with this session were much the same as in a 5k race and as the pace is slightly faster than race pace, it is a great session for improving race speed.

The great thing about 5k racing is that you do not need the recovery time of longer races. After building up your endurance through training and racing a marathon, spending a month training for 5k races will enable you to build speed and maximise the endurance gains you’ve made.

Train SMART!

Well, not entirely!
For example, a famous Swedish study where runners added a 20 minute continuous run at 10 mile race pace to their weekly training resulted in a 4% increase in Lactate threshold and improvements of 1 minute in 10k times all in just 14 weeks.
However, it’s just half the story!

Training at lactate threshold pace enables the body to become more efficient at running at that pace as the body ‘learns’ to produce less lactate at a given pace. The second half of the story though is that the body can be trained to improve the way it clears and uses the lactate already produced – if you can use it and burn it up more efficiently, you’ll be able to run at a faster pace for longer before you crash and burn right?

Research carried out by a scientist called Arend Bonen in Canada showed that there is a protein called MCT1 which enables this to happen.

Bonen’s research could be summarised as
• It is impossible to increase the amount of lactate the body is able to use without increasing MCT1
• You can train to obtain big increases in MCT1 in both the heart and the muscles
• You can see fairly dramatic results in a fairly short space of time.

So, if MCT1 is the Holy grail in terms of lactate usage, what type of training is the best to boost it?

Research carried out at Iowa State University in the USA suggested that high intensity efforts of 45-120 seconds with 2-4 minutes recoveries were ideal for maximising lactate tolerance.

To transfer that information to a training programme:

All distance runners need to be able to run long, so one session a week would be a long run.

The body needs to prepare for the challenge you are going to give it – both through building sufficient endurance but also by enhancing the neural pathways to become efficient at running at race pace. This is also known as the rule of specificity. So one session a week needs to be based around race pace.

From what we have seen about threshold pace, there are great benefits to work towards maximising it. So, one week could be a traditional tempo or cruise reps session and the next week, a session designed to boost MCT1. This could be something 8 x 1 minute fast efforts with 2 minute recoveries or 6 x 2 minutes fast with 4 minute recoveries.

Have fun and Train SMART!

The first type of speedwork we’ll look at is threshold training. In the 1980s, Jack Daniels (the world renown exercise physiologist and running coach – not the whisky guy!) introduced the term ‘cruise intervals’ to runner. These, along with tempo runs have become the mainstay of threshold training.

But what do the terms mean?

Threshold training – during running, the muscles obtain fuel from a process called glycolysis. As a bi-product of this process, lactic acid can be formed. When exercising gently enough, the body is able to utilise this lactic acid to help fuel the running effort. However, once you start running harder, the lactic acid can build at a pace that the body is unable to clear from the muscles. The point where the acid build up is occurring at the maximum rate at which the body can clear and use it is known by various different terms most commonly lactate threshold or anaerobic threshold. Threshold training is training at a pace that is designed to improve the body’s threshold ie to increase the speed at which the lactate rises at a pace which the body is unable to use.

Tempo runs – tempo runs are continuous runs at a pace that is designed to boost your lactate threshold. The effort required is the same as one you would use if racing for an hour. So, if you complete a 10k in 60 minutes, your 10k would be your threshold pace. For the Paul Tergats of this world who run a half marathon in 60 minutes, their half marathon pace would be their threshold pace. For most club runners it will be somewhere between 10k pace and 10 mile pace. Daniels would suggest that ideally a tempo run should be 20 minutes long (with additional warm up and cool down). Other coaches would include longer tempo runs for marathon runners eg Pfitzinger & Douglas include an 11k tempo run in Advanced Marathoning.

Cruise intervals – the aim of cruise intervals is to run a longish interval at threshold pace with a short recovery so that the lactate level remains fairly constant throughout the session. By running cruise intervals, a runner could run for longer periods at threshold pace than during a tempo run. An example would be for a runner whose threshold pace is 6 minute miling, a cruise session could be 4 x 1 mile with 60 seconds rest between each interval. This would give the runner 24 minutes at threshold pace – more than our 20 minute tempo run. Another use for cruise intervals is to throw a couple of mile intervals at threshold pace into a weekly long run.

There is an almost unbreakable link between race pace and lactate threshold. Your 10k pace will be very close to 2.5% above your threshold pace and your half marathon pace will be very close to 2.5% below it. Fortunately, lactate threshold responds well to training and can be improved by most runners. Daniels and most coaches would advocate plenty of tempo runs and cruise intervals to boost it.

But are they right???

Watch this space and train smart!!