Trail Runner Mag: Tempo Runs Boost Performance

Thanks to our friends at Trail Runner magazine for sharing this informative article about tempo runs and how they can dramatically improve your running, or trail running, performance.

Pain is Tempo-rary:
Boost your Performance with Tempo Runs
By Mark Eller

In Running Tough: 75 Challenging Training Runs, Boulder-based writer Michael Sandrock takes the favorite workouts of elite runners and renders them into an entertaining book. Some of the workouts-like Czech legend Emil Zatopek’s “100 X 400 Meters” (that’s 30 miles of track work in one session!)-verge on the superhuman, while other workouts in the book can be easily adapted for mortals.

Chapter 6 of Running Tough is devoted to tempo runs and includes testimonial from University of Colorado cross-country coach Mark Wetmore: “The greatest training effect comes right at your anaerobic threshold. That’s where you get the most stimulus for adaptation.”

The key to these workouts is running at the proper intensity. In short, tempo runs are a sustained effort at a “comfortably hard” pace. Some tempo workouts call for a series of shorter efforts, which makes them easy to mistake for speedwork or anaerobic interval training.

Whether tempo work is divided into blocks or done as one sustained chunk, the goal is quite different from high-intensity intervals. While most interval workouts push into the anaerobic zone, tempo runs are designed to teach your muscles to work aerobically as long as possible. For that reason it’s vital that tempo runs don’t exceed the “comfortably hard” level of exertion.

Avoiding the Anaerobic Plunge
When you run at an easy pace, your muscles convert stored fuel into energy in an almost entirely aerobic state. Increase your pace and you’ll gradually approach the point where your muscles can no longer handle the stress aerobically; to meet the increased demand for energy production, you’re forced to supplement the aerobic effort with anaerobic energy production, or glycolysis. An unfortunate side-effect of glycolysis is buildup of lactic acid, which when produced faster than it can be cleared, impairs muscle-cell contraction-and hurts.

Once you’ve “gone anaerobic,” you’re running on borrowed time. Elite athletes can withstand higher levels of anaerobic activity than less-fit ones, but everyone eventually succumbs to the muscle-seizing onslaught of excess lactic acid. Unless you reduce the workload to the point that your muscles can clear lactic acid faster than it is produced, you’ll reach a point where the effort becomes impossible to sustain.

During a tempo run, you should push yourself just hard enough that your muscles begin to increase the production of energy from anaerobic metabolism. You should hold this effort for a predetermined amount of time, then wind down the workout with some easy running.

Read the rest of the article at Trailrunner.com