high school

Coe-style elite 800m, 1500m, and mile training from “Winning Running”

If you want to understand training for middle-distance running events—800m, 1500m, 1600m, mile—you need to understand Peter and Sebastian Coe’s approach.

In the English-speaking world, Coe-style training absolutely dominated discussions about training in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, mostly due to the fact that Sebastian Coe, under the guidance of his father Peter, was the king of the 800m, 1500m, and mile in the 1970s and 1980s.

The analogy to the Ingebrigtsen family is obvious: a father with a bold vision for training and a son with incredible talent and grit, who not only rose to the top of the sport athletically but changed the way legions of runners approach training for their event.

Both coaches borrowed heavily from a pioneering compatriot—Gjert Ingebrigtsen from Marius Bakken,[1] and Peter Coe from Frank Horwill. Like Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Josh Kerr, Coe also had fierce rivals: fellow Brits Steve Ovett and Steve Cram, each of whom snatched medals from Coe in dramatic fashion.

That’s where the similarities stop, though—Sebastian and his father never had a falling out, and the structure of Coe-style training is almost diametrically opposite to that of Ingebrigtsen-style training.

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A guide to post-race workouts for runners

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.

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Individual variation in aerobic and anaerobic energy contributions to different events

Fast-twitch Frannie and Slow-twitch Sallie face off in an ultimate battle to discover who is truly the queen of the mile

Many books on training and exercise physiology (including mine) begin with a discussion of aerobic and anaerobic energy production. The next logical question to ask is how much these two energy systems contribute to the various running events—how “aerobic” is, say, the 800m? Such a question is sure to spark heated debate online, but I have always been skeptical of such figures, for two reasons.

First, some of the methods that were traditionally used to come up with the aerobic vs. anaerobic contribution to a particular event have not held up to scrutiny.

Take the concept of “oxygen debt”—the idea that you could measure anaerobic energy expenditure by measuring post-exercise oxygen consumption, as your body “paid” for its anaerobic energy production. This concept was known to be shaky as early as 1984, and though later research has improved on the accuracy of these metrics considerably, many of the papers that coaches and training books cite do not use these modern, improved methods.

Second, I have a broader disagreement with the search for one number: to say, for example that the 800m is “65% aerobic” (as Joe Vigil’s book does) or ~50% (as Coe/Martin’s book does) glosses over the fact that there is tremendous individual variation in how much aerobic versus anaerobic energy goes into a given event.[1]

In fact, that range of variation looks like this:

Event % Anaerobic (range for nine out of ten runners)
800m 15–33%
1000m 10–25%
1500m / mile 8–20%
3000m / 2 miles 4–10%
5000m 3–6%
10,000m 2–4%

Where do these numbers come from? Read on to find out!

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Predicting threshold pace, CV pace, and VO2max pace from 5k times

Most serious runners do workouts at threshold pace, CV pace, and VO2max pace. But how can you know if you're running the right pace for your threshold, CV ("critical velocity," a.k.a. critical speed), or VO2max sessions? There are plenty of conversion charts online, but it's not always clear whether they're making predictions that are accurate for most runners.

This article introduces a simple framework for determining threshold, CV, and VO2max pace based off your current 5k fitness, using percentages of 5k pace to set workout paces. Below, I'll show how these three training paces can be derived from the critical speed model, and present an analysis on thousands of race performances that result in the following training guidelines:

Pace Estimate Meaning Also known as
Threshold 90% 5k Fastest pace that produces a metabolic steady-state SSmax, LT2, CS-, T pace
CV pace 96% 5k Boundary separating metabolically sustainable and unsustainable paces CS, critical speed
VO2max pace 100% 5k Slowest speed that produces metabolic instability and drives oxygen consumption to VO2max CS+

Don’t forget that I have a handy pace percentage calculator for quickly calculating pace percentages!

These predictions are accurate for >90% of runners ("accurate" here meaning "producing the intended physiological effects") and come from data on hundreds of runners with 5k PRs from 14:00 to 25:00. They'll probably work pretty well outside that range too.

Naturally, these predictions work great for full-spectrum percentage-based training, but they work just as well in other systems too.

Want to know where these calculations come from? Read on!

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A comprehensive overview of Canova-style "full-spectrum" percentage-based training for runners

Percentage-based training, or as I've recently taken to calling it, full-spectrum training, is a mathematical approach to planning workouts for runners. Percentage-based methods are used by many top international coaches, most notably Renato Canova, to train runners at distances from 800m to the marathon. 

I could write a whole book about percentage-based training for runners (in fact, I did write a whole book on full-spectrum percentage-based marathon training), but the goal of this post is to give a clear, comprehensive, and readable overview of percentage-based training as a system—a set of principles that can be used to guide training decisions.

To this end, we’re going to focus on the concepts and rationale behind the percentage-based training method, as opposed to exact training calendars. This post does include an appendix with recommended workouts for every event from 800m to the marathon (even the 3k!), but event-specific full training calendars will be a project for another day.

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Getting the warm-up right

How do you warm up for a race or workout? If you're like most high school and college runners, your warm-up is probably not too far off from Joe Rubio's humorous characterization of the typical runner's pre-workout routine:

"10-15 min easy. 4 half-hearted strides. BS a bit. Run the workout"

This might be a sufficient warm-up if you're a novice runner.  But if you're at all serious about competitive running, it's well worth the time to take your warm-up more seriously. 

Today, I'd like to take a look at several elements of the warm-up and consider how a more advanced runner might use them to his or her advantage.

To be clear, the purpose of a warm-up is to get your body ready for the demands of the workout (or the race).  As a result, different workouts or different races will necessarily demand different warm-up routines, as will different individual runners. 

If you warm up for a 10k the same way you warm up for a mile, you probably need to reconsider your warm-up routine.  In this article, we will analyze several elements of the warm-up routine and discuss various ways to modify them based on the situation.

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Check out my new book on marathon training!