Intervals are the key to increasing speed.
I once read a study done on world class Kenyan runners. They divided them into two groups based on their 10K speeds. What they found is that the faster group of runners emphasized intervals to increase their speed, while the slower group emphasized tempo runs.
Interval training simply means running a short distance repeatedly with a walk or slow jogging break in between each interval.
"Short" is defined by the distance you are training for. A marathoner may do mile or half-mile intervals. A miler will probably do quarter-miles and mix in some even shorter segments, like 200 or even 100 meters.
The first men to break the 4-minute barrier for the mile—Roger Bannister and John Landy—trained almost exclusively with quarter-mile intervals, throwing in long runs here and there.
If you want to run faster, you should emphasize interval training. Once per week will do.
Rest is part of increasing performance. Training hard every day is not the way to become a great runner. You can get away with that when you're young, and five or six hard days in a road on an occasional basis can be beneficial, but the general rule is hard, easy, hard, easy ...
And most people's easy days are too hard.
Advice on how long to break between intervals vary. Based on reading many articles, it appears that the shorter the amount of time you break, the better the results.
However, you have to rest enough that these are intervals and not a short, fast, exhausting run.
One Runner's World staff member once said that for marathons, you should do a minute-per-hour workout. If you want to run a 4-hour marathon, for example, you should run half-miles in 4 minutes with a very slow half mile in between. Once you can do 10 of these, he says, you will be in shape to run a 4-hour marathon. The same pattern holds true for a 3-hour marathon.
This sort of interval involves a long rest, but I can testify from experience that it works dramatically, even for a slow runner like myself.
One other coach I read suggested one-minute walking rests between each interval, though he was speaking of 100 meter to 400 meter intervals, not half-mile intervals.
You can probably experiment with the rests between intervals. You want to make sure, however, that you can do all the intervals you have scheduled for yourself.
Faster than race pace.
Make sure you can do at least 3 or 4 intervals of appropriate length, and work up to 10.
Roger Bannister and his comrades developed the speed to run 4-minute miles by running 10 quarter-miles each time they worked out.
Then you can judge how fast you should be running by your ability to do all the intervals you have scheduled. If you can't do them, you're running too fast. If they're too easy, then you're running too slow.
For a long time I got a monthly newsletter filled with very technical articles from professional soccer coaches and their fitness coaches. The one thing they regularly warned was that almost everyone overdoes it.
Even intervals are not supposed to leave you completely exhausted when you're done. They will do you as much good and be much less likely to injure you if you leave a little steam in your engine when you're done.
Just a little. Intervals are supposed to be hard work. Maybe a good rule of thumb is never to leave yourself swearing you'll never do another set of intervals.
Return to How to Run Faster.