Workout of the Week: The 4-2
This effort-based workout is a great early to mid-season season session when you're still fortifying your fitness foundation and neither pace nor specificity are key concerns.
Workout of the Week
Workout of the Week: 1 mile, 9 x 400m
This is a great “getting back into it” session that isn’t meant to be that tough. I still use it today for that reason but I’ve also adapted it to serve a different purpose later in the season, which I describe in more detail here.
Workout of the Week: The 4 x 4
The 4 x 4 is a simple and straightforward workout that will launch your fitness to a new level, but you will have to earn it.
Workout of the Week: The Recovery Run
The easiest days in your training schedule for running need to be taken as seriously as the most challenging workouts.
Workout of the Week: Hudson Pickups
The 1-2-3-2-1-2-3-2-1 fartlek is an "introduction to power endurance" workout that can be used early in a training cycle when an athlete is still building fitness but ready to handle more work. The pickups are relatively short—1-3 minutes in duration—and the intensity—10K effort—should manageable for that chunk of time. The "recovery" intervals, which are run at more of a moderate training pace than a slow jog, are equal in duration to the work interval that preceded it. I like to use a version of this workout every few weeks during a half-marathon or marathon buildup because it forces the athlete to stay engaged the entire time and serves as a nice substitute for a standard threshold session.
Workout of the Week: Two-Minute Reps
Not every workout will leave you hunched over with your hands on your knees afterward—in fact, most of them shouldn’t—but every once in a while you just need to go out and make yourself as uncomfortable as possible.
Workout of the Week: The Halftime Cutdown
Looking for a challenging but not-too-hard workout to knock out before your next race? Look no further than the 5-4-3-2-1 halftime fartlek. It starts fast and finishes even faster but it will be over before it really starts to grind your gears down.
Workout of the Week: The 3-2-1 Mile Cutdown
My favorite workouts are pretty universal in nature, meaning you can go to them whether you're focusing on something as short as a 5K or as long as a marathon. The 3-2-1 Mile Cutdown session fits that bill.
Workout of the Week: The 5-n-Go Tempo
There’s a lot of confusion around the tempo run but stripped down to its core, this workout simply boils down to maintaining a steady effort for a prolonged period of time. And while the definitions of steady and prolonged can vary depending on a variety of factors, for the sake of simplicity and ease of creating a common understanding, let’s call the “classic” tempo run 5 miles at half-marathon pace. This is a pretty standard workout you’ll see utilized by a wide range of athletes and coaches to build aerobic strength, improve efficiency, and/or practice running race pace. The 5-n-Go Tempo adds a slight twist to the classic tempo run by squeezing down the pace for a mile or two at the end.
Workout of the Week: Yasso 800s
Yasso 800s are perhaps the most well-known speed workout amongst dedicated marathoners of all levels. The premise is pretty straightforward: If your goal is to run a marathon in, say, 3 hours flat, you should be able to do ten 800m repeats in 3:00 with a 400m jog for recovery between reps. A 2:45 marathoner would run their reps in 2:45, and so on and so forth.
