For today’s post, I will be talking about one of my favorite training sessions. I would like to discuss why I love this type of training and why this specific workout, what the benefits are and lastly what I did for the workout.
Tackling a great session and achieving all the goals in that session gives you a great sense of satisfaction. It makes you feel really good inside and gives you a sense of achievement from the hard effort that you gave, especially for that last mile.
For me this achievement was found in a session I love called a “threshold workout”. The reason I like this training so much is that it makes you work hard both physically and mentally to achieve the splits that you need to meet during the session. As your body is running just below ‘race pace’ it creates a large amount of lactic acid in your muscles, which burns like a living fire in your soul. Your mind is then beaten up crying and screaming like a baby, telling you to stop. This makes me work harder to push through the boundaries to do better. A quote from my idol Lionel Sanders, “Fear and pain are just tricks the mind plays on us.”
Although there are many types of running training, for example long run, Fartlek, hills, intervals, sprints, easy runs, tempo, threshold, just to name a few, mixing in a few of these a week and creating variation can massively improve your running, whether in stride, pace or efficiency. In my training I don’t do the same type of run twice in a week.
The benefits of threshold training, when done correctly, is immense. The threshold session, in my opinion, is the most important session of the week and what I believe improves me. Threshold is a pace you can hold for about an hour. The threshold session improves the amount of time you can run fast without suffering from lactic acid in your muscles and blood stream. This means you can run faster for longer. If it is paired up with a good interval/speed session, you will see improvements in both your speed and how long you can run at a pace without getting lactic acid for quite a while.
“Train Insane Or Remain The Same”
one of my favorite quotes
The session Coach Ray gave me this week for my threshold was a 10 minute warm up Level II ( for me about 4:20 min/km ish), followed by 400m @ Zone 6 (for me a pace of 3:25-3:35 min/km) then another 400m @ Zone 5 (which is just 10 seconds – give or take – slower than Zone 6). I then repeated this as many times as I could, until I failed two in a row, to meet the split time. I managed 30 minutes @threshold (22x 400m). This was quite pleasing as I was only expecting to do 25 minutes. After that I did a 10 minute cool down at Level II, followed by about ten minutes of stretching.
The good thing about this session is that you can do it anywhere at any time, although this time I did it on a track. Next time I might do it just along the roads to make it less tedious and more challenging to meet the splits.
I hope you guys enjoyed my little spiel on threshold training, why I like them and why they are so good. I hope you were able to learn something new.
Time for me to dash now as training starts in 10 minutes. Yikes!!!
Luke Clatworthy (Clatters Chatter)
Check out Luke’s article from last week here:
All Luke’s previous articles can be found here:
https://www.coachray.nz/category/client-stories/clatters-chatter/