The Tempo Run – (information taken from an article written by Jo Pavey)
A tempo run is a great way of boosting fitness and it doesn’t have to take up too
much time if you’re juggling a busy life.
What is a tempo run?
In short, it’s a run at a pace that’s ‘comfortably hard’. It’s therefore a tough pace but
not flat out, however you’ll need to run faster than a pace at which you’d be able to
hold a conversation! It’s also needs to be a pace that you can aim to sustain for the
duration of the run without slowing down.
It’s worth incorporating a tempo run into your training plan as the benefits include
improving endurance, cardiovascular fitness and running efficiency. Tempo runs are
also great for working on the mental resilience you need for racing as you’re able to
practise maintaining a challenging pace for a sustained amount of time.
When you consider why tempo running is beneficial from a scientific point of view, it’s
because you’ll be helping to increase your lactate turn point. Lactate turn point refers
to the intensity at which lactate accumulates more quickly than the body is able to
clear it. Most runners will have experienced that feeling of burning muscles and tired
legs when they have increased their pace. It’s not actually the lactate that is the
problem – it’s the build up of hydrogen ions that occurs when lactate is produced
which leads to increased acidity in the muscles therefore the burn and slow down.
By training at a pace on or around your lactate turn point it helps to improve the
body’s ability to clear and tolerate lactate. This will help increase your own personal
turn point, meaning you’ll improve your ability to run at faster paces.
To do a tempo run you need to ensure you do a warm up jog for around 10 mins
beforehand and a cool down for around 10 minutes afterwards. The tempo run itself
could be around 15 to 20 minutes or longer depending on your level of experience
and the length of events you’re training for. If you’re marathon training you may want
to do a longer slightly slower tempo run of perhaps 40-60 minutes.
With any new training type it’s important to introduce it gradually, especially if you’re
not used to running at faster paces. You could introduce tempo running by at first
breaking it up into tempo intervals, i.e. running 3×5 minutes at tempo pace with a
couple of minutes very easy jogging between each repetition.
Tempo intervals are also useful for runners who are training for longer events like
half marathons or marathons. For example, this could be something like 4×10
minutes with 3 minutes recovery. This is a useful addition to a training schedule and
is slightly different to a full interval sessions.
To begin with it may take a while for you to judge the pace that you’re able to sustain
for your tempo run. You might be used to gauging your pace on heart rate zones
and this would work in the same way just keep it to around 80% of your maximum
heart rate.