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Spring is here, and you’ve laid down a good base. You’ve swallowed your pride, ignored the pitying glances of less well-read or well-coached athletes as you loped around in zone 1 or 2. You have spent the last 6 to 10 weeks on good behavior, impersonating a rehab case. It’s time to kick it up a notch, and you’re allowed – you’ve earned it.
But what now? Turn your legs loose for the uninhibited romps of speed that your spirit desires several times a week, and your season could fall as flat as an overcooked soufflé by midsummer. You’ve survived that type of season before, where fall races degenerate into nightmares of grim determination, not the crowning achievements of the season you had dreamed of.
Whatever your sport(s) the challenge of the 2 nd phase for endurance training is the same: how to ensure a good transition between the base-building beginning and the intense race-readying work to come. Something in between is needed, and that is not well understood.
Read on and let’s explore the “early-season interval session”. We’ll cover some basic strategy and study some formats offered by the pros. Hopefully we can reveal some ways to turn your spirit loose without completely letting go of the reins.
This article includes:
Basic Concepts of Early Season Intervals
Early Season Interval Formats from the Pros
Downloadable Workouts ready to install in PC Coach
Once you have read this background article, take a look at our companion article this month. In “Gear for Your Other Gear” we look at some new models of heart rate monitors and speed/distance monitors to see how they can help you follow interval formats on road, trail or track.
Basic Concepts of Early Season Intervals
When considering intervals, many people flash back to their youth and fondly recall the athletics-as-punishment type of all-out 100s their high school coach used to end every practice. This is something different and much better, and coaches have had to find new terms to describe them. Mike Pigg’s coach calls them aerobic intervals. Jeff Galloway refers to pick-ups and to paced miles. Coach Benson uses “long repeat sets” and AT (Aerobic Threshold) workouts reined in by a max heart rate. All of them have a “not to exceed” component of some type, and most specify plenty of rest in between.
Early Season Intervals are fun ways to spend quality time with the zones you love. Whether longer times in zone three or smaller amounts up in zone four, this is a way to enjoy speed without paying the cost. The only challenge is keeping a lid on. The interval training we talk about here offers ways to set the upper limits (heart rate, pace/speed, or both) and ways to allow flexibility in recovery so that you continue to build the pyramid. It is, after all, only Spring Training.
This is the time of year when you develop the strength and fitness to be able to do harder workouts later on without injuries. Skip it at your peril! Patience and discipline to stay under the cap now will pay dividends in 8 or 10 short weeks.
So what makes Early Season Intervals different? They should include a control mechanism to keep the effort at an appropriate level. It is not easy to back off from your planned workout when the reality presents the choice: pay attention to the control mechanism and slow down or quit, or else exceed the limit and finish the workout as planned (“the limits must be set wrong”). But at this stage you are just learning where your current fitness is and letting it improve over time. And if you don’t heed the limit, why set it up in the first place? It requires a different mindset.
Two control mechanisms (both heart rate and speed/pace) are better than either one by itself because in the first few intervals, the pace limit will keep your initial exuberance under control, and in the last few when your heart rate soars as soon as you take off, the heart rate limit will cause you to slow down and keep you from doing too much. With early season intervals, the biggest problem is overdoing it.
As an illustration, here is a graph of an 800 meter with 400 recovery interval workout. We asked our subject for a special sacrifice: in the third interval, he was to intentionally exceed the heart rate limits we had set. He was happy to comply and it was fun during the third interval. But then, as the graph shows, his fitness was not up to the challenge. His heart rate climbed instantly upon starting the fourth, and notice that halfway through that 4 th 800 meters he was forced to slow down.
Graph of 800 meter Intervals performed with a Polar S625X.
This is a great example of how NOT to do early season intervals. The plan hinges on having the discipline to stay well short of a pace that ends in complete fatigue. One might think that it was a good 4 x 800 session, but the plan was 6 x 800. The athlete stopped upon fatigue, which is good, but better would have been to follow the real-time control structure (not-to-exceed heart rate) and to avoid going out too fast in the 3 rd and 4 th intervals.
This happens to a lot of us this time of year because we don’t know what the right settings are. But all is not lost; much has been learned. This athlete now knows that his upper heart rate limits should be set well below (maybe 5, but probably 10 beats below) the heart rates he reached in intervals 3 and 4. Next time out, armed with that new info and the determination to stay below that limit, it should be no problem to finish the 6 intervals with plenty left in reserve. If it is a problem, lower the limit again.
Finally, be aware that even though these are not completely fatiguing intervals, they are a notch harder than the other days of the week. If you start doing these workouts day after day, you’ll be fried within a few weeks. These are to be dropped into the ongoing schedule, two or three times per week, with easy recovery days or days off on either side.
Descriptions of Early-Season Interval Formats
Intervals come in only a few varieties. You can go for a given distance or for a given time. Then you can recover for a given distance or a given time. There are variations in how to recover, for example at a given speed/pace or as slowly as you like. Sometimes people recover until a certain low heart rate is reached. Intervals can be made infinitely unique by a mix of distances or times within the workout (ladders and pyramids). They can be made to help improve strength or biomechanics by doing them on uphill or downhill grades. That is too much for this article; let’s just talk about simple intervals, and sort out how they get you through phase 2 uninjured and feeling stronger.
One venerable running coach approached early intervals for 10K runners by doing 400 meters at “race pace” (really “goal pace”) with 400 recovery. A couple of weeks later they became 800s at RP with 400 recovery, then 1200/400 and by the end of this phase had his runners doing a bunch of 1600/200s all at race pace. It created confidence that the pace could be held during the race, but moreover, after all those repeats you had a pretty good handle on what race pace felt like. Not a bad theory, starting with short amounts of time at stress early on and increasing that time as fitness improved. Of course there was some black magic in figuring out what race pace should be.
Another challenge of that method was how to know when to quit. This was subjective and so was done under the watchful eye of the coach. With modern monitoring tools, however, it is possible for a self-coached athlete to know that you have reached a stopping point for the day as soon as an interval is finished, or better yet, during the interval itself. In this golden age, feedback on both speed/pace and heart rate limits is affordable and has very real benefits, especially in the early season.
Downloadable Workouts from three of the PC Coach Training Plans
Described below are some classic formats from the pros. Notice that they all contain at least one control element; most have both a speed/pace and a heart rate limit. When both limits are given, the goal is to stay within both, not just the one of your choice. These workouts are excerpted from the training plan designed by each pro, and can be downloaded free for installation into your copy of PC Coach Version 4.0 or later by clicking the link at the end of this article.
Format: “Mile Repeats” by Jeff Galloway
Jeff’s version of Early-Season Intervals is clean and simple. This is one that he uses in his Marathon and Half-Marathon plan. The description goes like this:
Warmup for 10:00, then do 6 acceleration gliders (short, gradual pick-ups to stretch out your stride). Do 3 to 5 mile repeats at x:xx pace (the pace given is specific to the person). Do not exceed YYY beats/min. (that is also specific to the person, about 80 to 85% max.) Walk recovery at least 4:00. Cooldown for a total of x miles for the workout. (The total distance varies as you progress through the early-season.
Note that Jeff gives you a choice to do as few as 3 or as many as 5 repeats, depending on how you are feeling. Your goal should be to do more repeats at a pace that you can sustain, rather than imploding after just three of them. The walk recovery is a safety valve that is very practical for early season.
Format: “Bike Aerobic Intervals” by Mike Pigg
This appears in the Mike Pigg Triathlon Plan when you are in the Aerobic Phase of your training. On the bike, warmup for 15:00 easy (example: 80 – 135 hr). Do 4 x 12 minutes at (example) 125 to 135 hr, with 2 minutes recovery at 115 – 125 hr. Cooldown 15 minutes.
Note: The title tells a lot about this workout. Staying aerobic, but teasing upwards to the top of that aerobic zone. Notice that recovery is only about 10 beats slower than the work. This “active recovery” has a self-governing nature, because the lack of complete restful recovery in between can keep you from going too fast during the work. It is designed for longer distance goals (such as triathlons), and it trains you to recover after a little stress without completely dropping out.
Format: “Long Repeat Sets” by Coach Roy Benson
A workout that begins to appear at the end of phase 1 in Coach Benson’s plan is called Long Repeat Sets. It has a format similar to this: 1 x 1600 meters with 400 recovery, then 2 x 800 meters with 400, then 4 x 400 with 400 recovery, and never go above about 80% of your max heart rate. The first mile is at a slightly slower pace than the 800s, and they are slightly slower than the 400s. The objective is to start slowly enough that the gradual sharpening as you progress through the workout is manageable, and you are still underneath the overall heart rate control. This format works well for early season work – the shortening of the distance offsets the increasing fatigue and allows for relatively more recovery as you progress through the workout. If you follow Coach Benson’s plan and give it a recent (last season) race result, it recommends the time for each interval, working out the gradual sharpening for you.
. Here's how to install the Early Season Intervals folder into your copy of PC Coach:
I hope these formats are useful to you in the next few weeks. Or maybe they will tease your imagination, and you will come up with your own format. Either way, for the next few weeks I wish you happy cruising and happy pyramid building.
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