All runners realize there are different shades of speed. Take Usain Bolt, for instance. Tall, muscular, and long-legged, he’s almost a literal “lightning Bolt.” No one has ever run as fast as Bolt, or collected more Olympic gold medals in the sprints. He’s one of a kind. So is his speed.
We recreational runners know we aren’t lightning bolts. Yet many of us could actually beat Usain Bolt in a 5K road race. That’s because there’s one thing called sprint speed, and quite another called endurance speed. At one level these speeds depend on the muscle fibers you were born with. On another level you develop them in your training.
Tempo training has become one of the most popular and valued forms of runner training, because it’s designed to increase endurance speed. It helps you maintain a strong pace for longer. That’s job one for just about all road runners, whether we’re preparing for a 5K or a marathon. We want to run a handful of seconds faster per mile, and then to maintain that pace as long as possible.
Training at tempo pace helps us accomplish this. Tempo pace rests midway between the easy, relaxed pace of everyday runs and the high-intensity effort demanded by intervals. When the famous American coach and physiologist Jack Daniels, PhD, discovered tempo training while living in Scandinavia, he learned that tempo runs should last about 20 minutes.
Daniels and others have evolved the classic tempo run modestly through the years. But only modestly. Beware of a so-called tempo run that lasts 10 or 12 miles, or even longer. That’s not a tempo run. It might be a great workout, but I believe many runners overtrain by extending tempo runs to longer than the original 20 minutes.
Tempo runs are almost universally described as “hard but controlled.” If that’s too vague for you, run your tempo efforts at your 10-mile race pace—a little slower than your 10K pace, a little faster than your half-marathon pace. Physiologically speaking, tempo runs raise your lactate threshold, so you can run longer at this pace before your muscles shut down from too much lactic acid.
In early 2017, Andrew Vickers, a runner and cancer statistician, published research that gave an important boost to tempo training. Vickers asked several thousand runners what kind of training they did prior to their best races. He expected tempo training to be associated with improved half-marathon and marathon performance, and it was.
He was surprised to discover that the runners also reported tempo training improved their 5K and 10K races. Its effectiveness covered essentially the whole racing spectrum. That’s why so many runners use tempo runs in their training.
Run hard but controlled for 20 minutes: In this classic take on a tempo run, you begin with several easy warm-up miles and then run hard for 20 minutes. Once you settle into your pace, relax as much as possible. The goal is to get your body accustomed to holding this rhythm without straining at it.
You shouldn’t be exhausted at the end. You should feel a pleasant sort of fatigue, but no more. Most runners feel completely recovered the day after a tempo run. In fact, some pack a tempo run and interval workout into back-to-back sessions on successive days.
Don’t run too fast or too far: Many runners suffer from a case of “more must be better” disease. This trap is easy to fall into when you’re doing tempo runs, because the pace doesn’t demand an almost all-out effort, as intervals do. Tempo runs fall into the category of submax running—slower than your best.
That means you could quite easily go faster and/or farther. Resist the temptation. Settle into comfortably hard, then switch to autopilot. If you went faster or farther, you’d be almost racing, which produces an exhaustion that’s the opposite of what you want from tempo training.
Try cruise intervals: As part of his thorough investigations into tempo training, coach Jack Daniels devised a workout he calls “cruise intervals.” These are 6- to 8-minute runs at tempo pace, with brief jogs between them.
For example, you might run three times for 8 minutes, with a mere 60-second jog between the repeats. This is just another way—a mental variation, really—to achieve the same end result as a tempo workout. Some runners find cruise intervals easier, some simply appreciate having several options.