How To Do Speed Workouts without Following a Structured Training Plan

Audio Transcript

Bill: What advice would you give casual, 5 to 10k runners who don’t workout on a track, who run on trails or in parks, and want to improve or keep their time steady as they get older? They also don’t want a specific intense coaching procedure. What guidelines should they have instead of just running a regular three mile loop at the regular pace?

Thank you.

Jeff: That’s a great question. We get a lot of that at RunnersConnect. There are athletes who don’t necessarily want to race, or their goal isn’t to have a structured training program.

They want to improve and they want to go faster. They also want to add some variety to their training.

It’s almost two questions in one way because, when I first listened to it, I was thinking, ” Bill is asking, how do I do speed workouts, and that kind of thing, if I run mostly on trails; not the roads or the track?”

As I listened to it a second time, I realized that Bill was asking around the lines of, how do you setup a training plan if your goal isn’t to be coached or to follow this super structured training program?

I want to approach it from both angles because I’m not 100% sure what Bill is asking, but I think it can help more people if we answer it from both angles. I’m going to attack it that way.

The first thing I’m going to answer is, how do you incorporate speed workouts, training and stuff, if most of the work that you’re doing is on trails; not on roads or tracks?

All you have to do is get a little bit creative.

One of my favorite things are hill workouts. Hill workouts are a great combination of speed, endurance and strength.

If you’re running on trails, it’s more than likely that you have some hills around you, and most trails are in the woods anyway. You can do some hill repeats.

It can be pretty impromptu, maybe there’s a loop that you do that has more hills in it than normal. You can sprint up the hill, probably at around five k effort, then recovery jog or walk back down.

You can do the same thing if you have a really hilly loop. You can do something like that.

Another one of my favorite hill workouts is the long hill workout. If you are lucky enough to live in a place with a really long hill, then one of your training days can be running up that hill.

Most of the professional athletes that train in Boulder, Colorado, run up the infamous mountain that they call “Mags” which is basically an incline that goes on for miles on end. That’s basically uphill the entire way.

A lot of people aren’t going to have access to that type of hill, but if you looked real hard, you can probably find something that has a long gradual incline, up the entire way. That’s the first half or second half of your run.

The other thing that you can do, is to make sure that you’re careful about your ankles. You can also look for a field, whether it be a sports field, or an open field in the woods, where you’re able to run on flat ground, and do Fartlek workouts – two to three minutes hard, two to three minutes easy.

Three minutes hard, three minutes easy, and hard can be anywhere from 5 k to 10k pace, depending on how short or long your interval is.

Generally speaking, the longer the interval, the more rest you need to take. If you’re going to do a five or six minutes hard, then you’ll want to take three to five minutes easy between them.

If you’re doing one or two minutes hard, then you’ll only need one or two minutes easy, in between each. Those are some creative ways that you can add to those types of workouts into your training.

If you’re somebody that is approaching this question from the idea of not wanting to be super specific or not wanting to follow a structured training plan, my advice to you is to incorporate some of those workouts that I talked about.

You can do a hill workout once a week, or do a fartlek workout.

The way that you can progress without having any structure, is try to make a progression in your workout that you do everyday, whether it be either pace or distance.

For example, in the Fartlek workouts, for one week, try doing three minutes hard, three minutes easy. Maybe do five to six of them.

Change one of those variables the next week, and do three minutes hard and three minutes easy, then do seven or eight of them, if you did six the first time. Or you could do three minutes hard, two minutes easy; something like that.

The other thing you can do is to change your pace and then try to change that same variable again, the following week.

Let’s say you did six repeats the first week, seven repeats the second week, and eight repeats the next week. Try to keep the same time, same rests if you are able to stay on the same pace and effort on the second half, on the seventh and eighth rep. That’s a good way to progress.

If you’re doing a hill workout, you can time yourself up the hill and try to see if you can do eight times the following week. See if you can get close to, let’s say it’s a 50 second hill, if you can get 50 seconds. Then the next week, see if you can get 48 seconds for one of them, then the next week maybe 47, 46 seconds.

Basically, you want to challenge yourself, and create games around being able to progress from week to week. Pick one of the variables, whether it be distance, pace, recovery or in total number of repetitions, and then try to better that progression for the next week.

Once you’ve done a few first off, for example, with the Fartleks, once you’re at eight or nine, obviously that’s becoming a pretty long workout, and you’ll want to go back to six repeats. However, change one of the other variables. Try to run faster, and try to take less rests and run for four minutes instead.

You’ll make great progress that way. You may not be racing and you may not be following a super structured plan, but you’ll become faster, even if you’re not doing workouts on the track or aggressively following a structured training plan.

Bill, I hope that answered your question from both directions, whichever one you had the question on.

If you do have questions for us, please head over to runnersconnect.net/daily and you’ll see a button there that you can click. If you’re on your phone, you’ll have to download a quick app, but if you are on a desktop, it will just open up and access your microphone and you can leave us a question there. We will happily answer it on air.

Once again, a big thank you for our awesome sponsor this week, Pacific Health Labs, who are the makers of Endurox R4. I believe that they are one of the best, most scientifically researched recovery products in the market.

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Finally, If you have any feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, feel free to email jeff@runnersconnect.net. We love to hear your feedback because it helps us improve the podcast.

Thanks so much again for listening to us this week.

Have a great weekend everybody.