Track season is nearly upon us and that’s got me thinking about a very track-centric question: when, if ever, should you do a workout after doing a race?
This strategy—a post-race workout—When used correctly, post-race workouts can help maintain an adequate training load and balance out the distribution of speeds within your training schedule, even when you’re racing frequently or have scheduling obligations to compete early in the season, when you’d like to be getting in more general and supportive training.
So, let’s take a look at what post race workouts are, who should use them, and when.
What are post-race workouts?
At the most basic level, a post-race workout is exactly what it sounds like—it’s a workout you do after finishing a race! A common session for a distance runner might look like this:
15 min progressive pre-race warmup (see linked article for details)
1600m track race
Change into trainers + sweats, find teammates (~8-10 minutes, ideally)
5 min easy run, then:
5 x 3 min at 96-98% LT2 pace with 1 min jog recovery
Then 10 min easy
Instead of a simple easy cool-down, we’ve “injected” some additional quality into the day. Now, instead of 1.6 km of quality for the day, we have 6.6 km of quality.
The post-race workout solves a common problem at all levels of track racing (and rarely, road and XC racing)[1]: what do you do about a day that only has one mile (or two, or three) of quality?
If you showed up to practice and the workout was 4 x 400m at 1600m pace with one minute of rest, you’d think the workout was way too easy. But if you run a one-mile race, that’s essentially what you’re doing, sans the recovery interval.
Yes, an all-out race is much more demanding in some sense, but biomechanically speaking it’s still just a certain speed × a certain distance (e.g. 3k pace for 3000 meters). So, if you are trying to maintain a certain overall training load (however you define it), you need to get some extra volume and quality in somewhere.
And working out after the race makes the most sense: you don’t really want to do it the day before the race, because you want to be fresh for competition (often early-season times are what earn your “ticket” to more competitive invitationals, conference championships, or fast heats later in the year). For the same reason, you don’t want to do a lot of quality immediately before the race either.
You can sometimes workout the very next day after a race, but because of the timing of delayed onset muscle soreness, it often makes sense to work out immediately after the race.[2]
Working out right after a race gives you the benefit of being fully warmed up and still having some of the amped-up excitement of competition—though of course you also have the fatigue lingering from your race as well.
Who should do post-race workouts, and when?
Post-race workouts require reasonably good pacing skills and relatively high levels of ambition and motivation, and for these reasons, they are best used with intermediate to advanced-level runners.
If you’re a coach of a team, you can broaden the range of runners a bit by letting younger or less-experienced athletes “lean on” their older, more experienced teammates to set the pace and maintain the mental discipline to actually do the workout, even after an all-out effort. Still, I would hesitate to use post-race workouts for a first-year high school runner, and only sometimes with sophomores.
For obvious reasons, post-race workouts are not a good idea for someone who has been working back from injury or illness—the race itself is quite a big stress on their body.
Beyond the physical loading, it’s also important to consider the psychological load involved with the competition. Even for an athlete planning on doing post-season track meets, I would not use a post-race workout for a high school runner after the state championships (especially their senior year): the emotional build-up and atmosphere is already so high that adding more psychological load is going to be too much.
Late-season races also end up being much more physically and psychologically draining, making the value of a post-race workout questionable even from a training perspective.
The best time to use post-race workouts is after early season meets, especially in team and club settings where you often have races on the calendar that are not particularly important, and that happen well before you’ve done much in the way of race-specific training.[3]
One nice thing about these early-season competitions is that, without much specific training, it’s hard to do a lot of damage in terms of “going to the well”—which is also something you should consider with post-race workouts.
One other trick you can use as a coach to manage the psychological load: don’t tell your athletes they are doing a post-race workout until after the race!
Principles for designing post-race workouts
My basic philosophy for post-race workouts is that the workout should be a different kind of stimulus than the race itself. It makes no sense to run 400m repeats at 1500m pace right after racing 1500m all-out—you just dida 1500m specific session, indeed the most specific kind of session possible! So, better to seek out a different, complementary stimulus.
This different stimulus can either be speed-focused—faster than race pace—or endurance-focused (slower than race pace).
Because endurance is more important than speed, your default bias should be to lean towards endurance-focused post-race workouts, but you should also consider your other workouts for the week. If you just did a big threshold season on Tuesday, and are racing a 3k on Friday afternoon, it might make more sense to do post-race short speed versus a post-race tempo run.
In terms of volume and recovery, the post-race workout should be slightly lower volume and use longer recovery intervals than what you would do in a similar non-all-out setting. A default starting place might be 60–80% of the volume and about 25–50% longer recovery intervals. As you get more experienced with post-race workouts you can increase volume if you want, up to the volume of a “normal workout” if tolerated.
Across the board, you’ll want to adjust the pace to be 2–4 % slower than usual for any sort of endurance-focused workout. All-out races necessarily cause some muscle damage that’s going to hurt your running economy, so if you try to run the same speed you do when you’re fresh, you’ll get a different physiological effect.
This deterioration in running economy is most noticeable when doing high-end aerobic work (e.g. classic Daniels-style cruise intervals); for those sessions especially you’ll need to be more controlled than usual to get the intended benefit.
Examples of post-race workouts for different running events
To get a better handle on specifics, let’s go through some examples of common patterns for post-race workouts in different events. I’ll give endurance-focused and speed-focused examples for each. Obviously you should adjust volume and difficulty up or down depending on mileage and experience level.
In all cases, assume that the workout should be preceded by at least 4–5 min of easy running, and followed by an easy cool-down of at least 4–5 min (adjusted according to mileage needs).
Note that some of these examples are a type of "workout" you probably already do: running another race at the same meet! Not all secondary races fall under the umbrella of post-race workouts, but the speed/endurance support framework is useful for thinking about how secondary races can be helpful from a training perspective.
Post-race workouts for the 800m and 4x800m
| 800m: Endurance-focused |
|---|
| 16–24 x 150m at predicted 3k >> controlled mile pace with 30–35 sec walk rest |
| 8–10 x 300m at predicted 5k pace w/ 100m very slow jog recovery |
| 4–5 x 3 min mini-tempo run (~predicted threshold pace, roughly) with 1 min walk + 1 min jog recovery (800m specialists only) |
| Pacing part or all of a 3k or 3200m competition, treating it as a continuous tempo run (~predicted 5k, 8k, or threshold pace), or 3200m competition at max effort (for distance runners only)[4] |
| 2 sets of 4–5 x 2 min at predicted 8k pace (or ~“CV pace”) with 1.5 min jog recovery and 3–4 min easy run between sets (or no set rest for distance runners) |
| 12–16 min continuous tempo at 96–98% predicted LT2 pace (for distance runners only) |
| 800m: Speed-focused |
|---|
| 2 sets of 4–5 x 60m fast up a steep hill at 90 >> 100% max speed with 1–2 min walk between reps and 4–5 min walk/jog between sets |
| 6 x 150m accelerations, building to last 50m at 800m >> 400m pace, 150m walk back between reps |
| 400m or 4x400m competition |
Post-race workouts for the 1500m / 1600m / mile
| 1500m/1600m: Endurance-focused |
|---|
| 3k/3200m competition |
| 12–14 x 300m at 5k pace with 100m jog recovery (or 100m float recovery, for more advanced runners) |
| 10–14 x 80 seconds at predicted 10k pace with 30 sec walk recovery (Ingebrigtsen-style quasi-threshold repeats) |
| 5–7 x 3 min at 98% predicted LT2 pace with 1–1.5 min jog recovery |
| 15–20 min continuous tempo at 96–98% predicted LT2 pace |
| 1500m/1600m: Speed-focused |
|---|
| 6–8 x 80m fast up a steep hill at 90 >> 100% max speed with 1–2 min walk rest |
| 2 sets of 4 x 150m with first 50m accelerating and last 100m at 800m pace, 2 min walk rest between reps and 3–5 min walk/jog between sets |
| 800m competition |
| 4x400m competition |
Racing a mile is a classic case where post-race workouts make a lot of sense. The mile just isn’t that much volume, and milers often need a steady supply of endurance work to keep their aerobic fitness up. So, I would again default to endurance-focused workouts unless you have already been doing a lot of endurance-focused work during the week.
Milers still need some individualization in their post-race workouts; I generally wouldn’t have an 800/1500 runner do a post-race continuous tempo unless they’re already very comfortable with that type of workout.
Post-race workouts for the 3000m / 3200m / two mile / maybe 5k
| 3k/3200: Endurance-focused |
|---|
| 10–12 x 90 seconds at predicted 10k pace with 30 sec walk recovery (Ingebrigtsen-style quasi-threshold repeats) |
| 4–5 x 4 min at 98% predicted LT2 pace with 1 min jog recovery |
| 3 x 7 min at 96% predicted LT2 pace (“sub-threshold)” with 2 min jog recovery |
| 16–20 min continuous tempo at 95% predicted LT2 pace |
| 25–30 min strong (~95–98% predicted marathon pace), possibly through moderate rolling hills |
| 3k/3200m: Speed-focused |
|---|
| 8–10 x 200m with first 50m accelerating + last 150m at 1500m / mile pace, 100m walk + 100m jog recovery |
| 8 x 30 sec fast uphill at 1500m / mile effort, easy jog down recovery (Ingebrigtsen-style hills) |
| 6–8 x 80m fast uphill at 90 >> 100% max speed with 1–2 min walk rest |
How long to wait after the race?
One other big “recovery interval” to consider is how long you wait after the race before starting the post-race workout. The most useful scientific work here actually comes from the critical speed model: several studies have attempted to estimate the rate of reconstitution of the “D-prime” parameter—essentially, “how fast does your anaerobic fuel tank refill?”[5]
Findings (from cycling) suggest that your “anaerobic fuel tank” refills in an exponential-decay-like manner, with a half life of about 4–5 minutes, though with a lot of individual variability.
What that means in practice is that, after an all-out race, you regenerate half of your anaerobic energy reserves in about 4–5 minutes, then 75% at 8–10 minutes, then 87.5% after 12–15 minutes, etc.[6]
The specific numbers are a lot less important than the broader conceptual implication, which is that even 10 minutes after a race, you aren’t operating with nearly as much anaerobic energy that you’d have in a workout, so you will need to take longer recovery intervals and perhaps do less overall workout volume to get a similar stimulus.
In practice, there’s really no way to round up your teammates, change into trainers, and start a post-race workout in less than about 8–10 minutes. On the other hand, you don’t want to wait too long: otherwise, you’ll be stiff and tight when you try to start running fast again. In practice I think the best practice is to start running easy within 10–15 minutes of finishing the race.
After a ~4–5 min segment of easy running—which is helpful to “flush out” some of the lingering fatigue and stiffness after the race—you can start the post-race workout.
The big exception here is when you’re using a competition as a post-race workout. In that case you’re basically at the mercy of the competition schedule, and you’ll usually have to do it with its own warm-up and cool-down.
Practical aspects of post-race workouts
With real post-race workouts you often have to be pragmatic, adapting the workout based on what kind of terrain and facilities you have access to. Here are three examples of track facilities in my home state of Minnesota that offer very different possibilities for post-race workouts.
The indoor track at St. Olaf College in Northfield has a balcony-level warm-up track above the main competition venue that’s nearly 300 meters long—a perfect place for doing longer repeats at threshold, 5k, or 10k pace. The long straightaways on the warm-up track are likewise very well-suited for short accelerations of 60–80 meters, but the tight turns mean that fast 200s, 300s, and 400s are not a necessarily a good option.
It's usually plowed all the way down to bare pavement! This was just the best image I could find.
About an hour north, the University of Minnesota’s indoor track is a more cramped facility with no such warm-up track, but the fieldhouse is situated only half a mile from the river paths along East River Parkway, which are (usually) fastidiously plowed and well-lit even in the winter.
As such, when I was coaching at Edina we would often have our athletes do continuous tempo runs as a post-race workout after early-season indoor meets at “The U,” given the ideal terrain.
It's hard to tell but the paved path next to the track is indeed an uphill
A 30-minute drive west of the U is Minnetonka High School, home of this year’s 7th place NXN finisher Sean Fries and steeplechase Olympian Matt Wilkinson. Minnetonka’s outdoor track plays host to several early and mid-season meets for high schools in the western suburbs of Minneapolis, and is situated at the bottom of a large basin that has a ~150 meter paved road on a steady grade leading down to the stadium entrance.
This kind of setup is ideal for short hills, either true hill sprints or “Ingebrigtsen-style” fast repeats of 20–30 seconds.
Adapting workouts for partial track access
One common practical challenge is that the most ideal place for a workout—the track—is in-use for the meet itself. Sometimes you can design your post-race workout around what parts of the track are being used—for example, doing ~150m repeats on the backstretch during events like the 100/110 hurdles that only use the home stretch.
Even if your goal is to get in an aerobic workout, you can use very short recovery to achieve a quasi-threshold effect—e.g. by doing 24–30 x 150m at controlled mile pace with 25–30 sec walk recovery, going back and forth (alternating directions each rep). See this article on quasi-threshold workouts for more inspiration on this front.
Recap
Post-race workouts are a useful tool that belong in your training toolbox if you (or the athletes you coach) are competing at 800m to 3200m, and in some situations the 5k too. The purpose of a post-race workout is to get an adequate physiological training load for the day when your actual competition distance totals up to less volume than you’d like to run in a workout.
Post-race workouts are an advanced training technique that are best used with more experienced, better-trained runners. Good pacing skills and a good baseline of fitness are required, as is the mental discipline to do the workout as intended—not hammering too hard because you’re upset about your race, and not sandbagging because you’re already mentally spent.
Consider both the physiological and the psychological training load of the competition before deciding whether a post-race workout is a good idea: psychological speaking, an intense, high-stakes meet is not a good venue for post-race workouts, even if it makes sense from a physiological training load perspective.
Since the race itself is the most “specific” race-specific workout you can do, it doesn’t make sense for a post-race workout to involve more running at race pace.
Instead, you should complement and counterbalance the training stimulus of the race with either an endurance-focused or a speed-focused post-race workout that’s significantly slower, or significantly faster, than race pace. By default, you should lean towards choosing endurance-focused workouts, but make your choice in light of your overall balance of workouts in the preceding week or so.
The practicalities of post-race workouts end up mattering at least as much as their benefits on paper. You’ll have to think about what’s possible given the facilities and location you’re competing at, getting creative when necessary.
Learn more about advanced training techniques
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Footnotes
[1] I’ll be using the example of track racing throughout this article, since it’s by far the most common use case, though it does make sense to do post-race workouts after a road mile or a road 5k. If you are an especially advanced runner you could also do a post-race workout after a road 8k, but I’m not a fan of doing post-race workouts after a 10k or anything longer. Later in the article I’ll touch on some applications to 5k XC as well.
[2] A common situation where a day-after workout can make sense is a Friday night race into a Saturday morning practice; the common Friday night meet / Saturday long run is essentially “clustering” two workouts into a ~12–16 hour window. Workouts the morning after are often lackluster because you tend to be more tired, more sore, and less excited / amped up than you were after the race. You also have “extra” mileage for the week (maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing) because you have to warm up and cool down again.
[3] At the high school and college level in the United States, there are rules regarding the minimum number of competitions in a season, so the racing season ends up being quite long—especially if you have separate indoor and outdoor seasons. Track teams also have to balance the optimal distribution of competitions for distance runners against the optimal distribution for sprinters and throwers, who benefit a lot from competing early and often (especially if they did not do any off-season training).
[4] I would only have an 800m runner do a 3k or 3200m competition as a post-race workout if the athlete was very “chill” about running competitions and was not intimidated by the distance. For most 800m runners, tossing them headlong into a two-mile—even as a workout—is not going to go well. Any short sprints coach who has tried to toss a 100m specialist into the 4x400m can probably understand the mental blocks that many athletes have about longer race distances. Acting as a pacer for a teammate is a good way around this problem, though some high school leagues have rules against pacers. Obviously if the athlete is a 1600/3200m runner “racing down” at this particular meet, doing the 3200 is not a problem.
[5] The term to search for is “W'-balance” also known as “W-prime balance” or “work-prime” balance — most of the work to date has been in cyclists.
[6] Another way of thinking about this half-life concept is “five minutes after an all-out mile, you could run 800m at mile pace in another all-out effort” which seems roughly correct.
Related articles
Coe-style elite 800m, 1500m, and mile training from “Winning Running”
Two workouts that aren’t in Marathon Excellence
A high-level picture of psychological training load for runners
A high-level picture of biomechanical training load for runners
A high-level picture of physiological training load for runners
Percy Cerutty’s training philosophy for distance runners, 50 years on
Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen’s Norwegian Single Threshold training approach
Sub-70 half marathon training using a percentage-based approach
Individual variation in aerobic and anaerobic energy contributions to different events
Great article John, I think there's been a gap in literature/education on best practices for post-races workouts. I love picking coaches' brains who use them, but I am not aware of many resources on their use. You're on a heater of great articles this fall
Thanks, glad you found it helpful!