Tuesday Workout of the Week: 5 x 3 min

I've been running Tuesday night track workouts for so long that if it happens to be Tuesday and I'm not heading off to some indoor or outdoor track to experience another rousing evening of oxygen debt -- well I feel like something's missing from my life. Some guys have bowling night or poker night; I have track night.

Anyway, I've been thinking for a while that it would be interesting to write about certain track workouts -- what they are designed to accomplish, when they are appropriate, and what they feel like. I don't know how long this will last, but I'm going to try to pick one workout each week and write about it.

This week's Tuesday workout: 5 x 3 min with 3 min rest

I have sometimes referred to this as nature's perfect workout: run 3 minutes fast, walk or jog 3 minutes slow, and repeat for a total of five times. Of course, as with any fast running, warm up with a couple of miles of easy jogging, some dynamic flexibility drills, and 4 x 100m strides.

This is an excellent early season workout for runners who aren't doing particularly high mileage and who might be doing their first track workout of a new season. I would NOT recommend this for new runners or those coming off an extended layoff from consistent training.

The real key to this workout is to run the fast parts at a pace that represents your body's maximal oxygen uptake. For many runners, a good approximation is your race pace for 2 miles. For example, if you are a 10:40 2-miler, you would run at about 80s per quarter.

Since for many H.S. distance runners, the proper pace will have them running about 800m in 3 minutes, it's easy enough to convert this workout to 5 x 800m, with 3 min rest. The total volume is only about 4000m -- 2.5 miles -- which is appropriate if your total weekly mileage is 30-40 miles a week. The rest is generous. If this workout is repeated later in the season, you can progress by adding volume or reducing the rest. It's amazing how adjusting the recovery time can transform a pretty easy workout into a challenging one.

In my experience, most younger runners find this pace to be quite slow for the first couple of intervals, and increasingly challenging as the workout continues. But remember, I touted this as a good early season workout, part of a foundation of strength on which you can build speed later.

The main goal of this workout is to increase the body's aerobic capacity. It turns out that one of the best ways to do that is to run at or just below your maximal oxygen uptake pace (also called V02 Max pace) . Of course, you could run these intervals faster, and probably finish the workout, but then you are putting more effort into training a different energy system, which is not the point of the workout.

Ideally, you will do this workout as part of a progression of similar workouts (similar in the sense that the volume, length of the fast intervals, and pace will be similar). After 4-5 weeks of such workouts, they will be quite noticeably easier, and so it make sense to gradually increase the difficulty. For example, as I mentioned earlier, you can keep the workout the same except cut the rest to 2:30, 2:00, or 1:30 and make the workout harder that way. Or you can increase the number of fast intervals. I usually like to do one of these two things, rather than increase the pace of the workout right away.

Some coaches will object that this workout is not hard enough for their better athletes, even as an early season workout. If a runner is doing higher mileage, it might be appropriate to increase the volume by running 5 x 1000, or 6 x 800, or more, but I would rather err on the side of caution, and set up the workout so that runners have a good chance of completing the work at the goal pace without having to kill themselves to do it. But that's just me.