I absolutely love the balance of this workout with a good amount of faster stuff to refine technique and a big old block of grindy 10k paced work in the middle to keep the session honest.

WHAT?

Legs, Lungs & Lactate Ladder Pt.2
3x30s, 3x2mins, 3x3mins, 3x2mins, 3x30s
@ mile & 10k race pace
1min jog recoveries

Terrain: Undulating terrain for a fartlek session or flat, measurable pathway for accurate GPS readings.

The idea with a ladder session like this is that you set the tone with shorter, sharper reps at the start—focusing on good technique—before moving into more intensity and grind in the middle. And finally finishing off with that quality again, this time fatigued.

Make the shortest reps about mile pace/effort and all the others 10 race pace/effort (no faster this week because of the volume of work you’ve got to get through.

WHY?

This workout tests and strengthens legs, lungs and lactate. There’s 24 minutes of work in here, so it’s a good solid session!

We want to really dial in the legs with great technique in the 30-second efforts at the start and then really test out your ability to run well when fatigued for the final 30-second efforts.

The lungs get a great workout in the middle stages and we also test your body’s ability to flush out the fatigue by only having relatively short 1-minute jogs.

HOW?

You could run this session as a pure fartlek run by going off-road and not worrying about exact paces, but do it all by feel. Or you could keep it on a flat measurable pathway so you have better feedback from watch on how fast you’re moving.

Be sure to keep the 1-minute jog recoveries VERY light.

Head over to the Race and Pace Calculator at tempofit.org to work out your paces.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK:

WHEN RUNNING DOESN’T GO TO PLAN

By Hayden Shearman

We all have goals and plans with running. Whether that’s to run a certain distance or time or qualify for a certain event. But the truth is that more often than not things get in the way of those plans.

Injuries, weather, illness, blisters, life stress, health issues, and even just not feeling on your game—all these things can act as spanners being thrown into the works of our running plans. And these spanners can be disheartening at best and downright depressing most of the time.

So, what can we do as runners to combat attack on our well laid plans?

In the podcast I lay out a planning procedure that I call Deep Plans that layers up our goals and strategies. So instead of having a binary, one-dimensional plan with a result fail or succeed, we create foundations to those plans.

For example, my plan might be to qualify for the Boston Marathon. But the underlying plan behind this is to be the best runner I can be right now. And the underlying plan behind that is I want to be fit and active. And behind this plan is a goal to be healthy and happy. And behind this a goal to refine my character.

So, you can see that when layer up your goals, if something happens like an injury or weather event of Covid race cancellation, you’ve got another layer to that plan that you can fall back on and remain successful. For example, if the race gets cancelled, I can do a solo time trial and therefore still achieve the goal of being as good a runner as possible right now. And if I get injured, I can still remain active and fit through deep water running, walking, cycling or going to the gym.

For more, be sure to listen to the TempoFit Workout of the Week podcast for this week.