- If there's one workout any endurance runner
or triathlete should be doing, its the tempo run.
And there's a good reason for that because
you get a lot of bang for your buck.
In other words you make big gains in relatively little time.
- Yeah, and the term tempo is actually
thrown around quite a lot without everyone knowing
exactly what it means, so, were gonna be taking you
through what it is and how to do it.
- Yeah, this is Jordanian Olympic triathlete Lawrence Fanous
now, we've trained a lot together over the years
and Lawrence I hate to tell you,
we're actually gonna do it too.
- Are we?
- Tsk, afraid so.
(upbeat music)
- The tempo run is a session
I actually use in my own training programme
and you'd be hard pushed to find any runner
or triathlete who doesn't use it in theirs.
- Well, that's actually why I've got you here Lawrence,
because I am prepping for a half marathon
in just a few weeks time, so,
I'd like you to push me a long in my own tempo run.
But first of all, what is a tempo run?
(upbeat music)
- To explain what tempo running is
we need to get a little bit sciency for a second.
Everybody has a lactate threshold,
and lactate threshold represents the point at which
your body starts to create to much lactic acid
for it to be flushed away effectively.
Anything over this point and you just end up slowing down.
- [Mark] So when we talk about tempo,
we're meaning a pace that is at or
near to our lactate threshold.
The idea of this is that running at this pace
will gradually bump our threshold up.
- Yeah that's right, so, what is this pace
and how should it feel?
You should off at a comfortably hard pace
and as you get through the run it should start
to bite as you get toward the end.
And theoretically its actually the maximum pace
that you should be able to hold for round about and hour.
- [Mark] But how many of us are really going to do
an hour run test to find this out.
So a good alternative is to work at your 10K pace
and add around 10 to 20 seconds per kilometre.
If you're working by heartrate,
its roughly 80 to 90 percent of your maximum heartrate.
And on a perceived effort scale of 1 to 10,
its about a 7 out of 10.
But how are we going to go about doing this?
(upbeat music)
- So now we know what a tempo run is,
we need to decide on a good place to do it.
Me and Mark have come down to the park today
which is a great place cause of the smooth surface
and the runs to be straight on flat roads.
- Yeah, but you can do a tempo run wherever you like,
but from my experience its a session
that you wan to get down into your pace with,
so you want a terrain or route that's gonna
allow you to crack on without any disruptions.
- Yeah, in terms of the structure of session,
the intervals tend to be quite long.
Today me and Mark are going to be doing two by 15 minutes
tempo with two minutes toward recovery.
- Yeah, but we have built up to this,
and wouldn't have been able to do this session
a couple of months back, so,
if you are starting out, you wanna go for something
slightly shorter, break it down to smaller chunks,
something like four by five minutes
with a long recovery of about five minutes.
- Yeah, and as you start to get fitter,
you want to start to build the interval time up
or even start to bring the resting intervals down.
- So, should we crack on with this then?
- Yeah, I guess we should.
- Okay, first rep for tempo at 15 minutes, let's go.
(upbeat music)
- Whew!
First rep down, to enter a two minute jog recovery now,
how you feeling mate?
- Really good actually, to be honest with you
I'm hardly breathing.
- Haha, rubbish!
That is a good point, we shouldn't be killing ourselves
from this session, actually,
we should be able to have a short conversation
if you needed to, or not,
but that's more down to my company.
- Oy!
- Okay, second rep, three, two, one, let's go!
(upbeat music)
Three, two, one, stop.
Ugh!
Good session mate, thanks for pushing me along there.
- Yeah, the progress was good actually,
I really enjoyed that.
- Alright, lets go grab our jackets and warm down.
- Lets do it.
- Well, I was actually really lucky to have
Lawrence with me today, pushing me along,
because, well, we're quite similar on the run,
but if you are running with others,
and your tempo zones aren't the same,
don't try doing your tempo efforts together.
- [Lawrence] No, it will just defeat
the object of the session and you'll either be running
far too fast or too slow, and you won't be moving
your lactate threshold on at all
which is the whole point of doing it in the first place.
- And finally, it is worth mentioning that a tempo session
is quite damaging, you're running quite hard
for a long duration so you should only try and do
one per week or one every couple of weeks,
and then, make sure you take one or two
easier days of running afterwards.
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