There are few runners among who don’t wish we were a little faster.  Just like the key to running farther is running farther, the key to running faster is running faster.  So simple and yet so hamstring burningly difficult.  Lots of runners do their speed workouts on Wednesday, probably because in a running week that includes a long run on Sunday, the spacing of speed and distance workouts gives enough recovery time.

I’m not big on track workouts and most of my speed work in the past has really been informal – hills or friends (I’ll talk about that in a minute).  But I’ve got a time in mind that I’d like to hit for my marathon (3:50) and since it’s been 5 years since I ran a marathon and I’ve had a baby since then, I’ve slowed a bit.  So today I did my first formal speed workout.  There are several options for speed work, I’ll cover a few including what I’m trying.

Yasso 800s This is what I’m doing for my training.  It sounds easy enough and has lots of believers.  This is specifically for marathon training.  You take your marathon goal time and attempt to run 800 meters (or about 1/2 a mile) at a time equal to that, i.e. if you are shooting for a 3:50 marathon, you should be doing 800 meters in 3 minutes and 50 seconds.  After each 800m you do a 400 meter recovery.  My training plan had me scheduled to do 6 cycles of this with a 2 mile warmup and a 2 mile cooldown.  I only made it 3 cycles and then just finished the rest of the distance with an easy run.  But it really pushed me and I’m going to keep it in my plan each Wednesday until my race and work up to 6 cycles. Read here for more detailed info on Yasso 800s.

Track workouts If you have access to a track, there are so many track workouts you can do to increase your speed.  Here is a good one if you are training for a 5k or 10k.

Fartlek File this under sounds nasty but isn’t, well not nasty in the way you think.  Fartlek literally means “speed play” in Swedish. You don’t need a track or to keep track of distance, it’s an informal way to add a little speed work into your run.  Remember when you were a kid and you’d be walking with a friend or sibling and have a spur of the moment “race you to the mailbox” challenge? Fartleks are kind of like that, you add short bursts of speed in to a run, 30 seconds to 3 minutes. You don’t even have to schedule a fartlek session on your training plan, fly by the seat of your pants as my mother would say and just add it into a run when you are feeling good.

Run Hills I used to do my Sunday runs with a training group and we’d run the Omaha Marathon course which was hilly.  We’d alternate our complaining with our hill mantra which was “hills are speed work in disguise.”   You can do formal hill repeats which is just what it sounds like, repeatedly running the same hill or resist your natural urge to avoid the hills and pick a hilly course for your run a few days a week.

Find a faster friend There are so many benefits to running with someone else or a group and one of them is that it might just make you faster.  Group runs are really good for this because you usually have a nice range of paces and you can find a pack at a pace you’d like to maintain and run with them.  I think that we naturally speed up when we are running with someone else anyway. It’s probably part bravado or if you are like me, I think “well I don’t want to slow this person down so I better keep a quick pace” and that person is probably thinking the same thing and we are both probably running faster than we would alone!

You don’t have to be shooting for a marathon to benefit from speed work, it can help you training for any distance.  And it shakes your muscles out of the complacency of those runs every day that can get to a point where they are routine.

Add this to your running mix and don’t let anyone slow you down.