S2E3: Why Critical Velocity Training is Pure Magic

(upbeat music) Hey everybody, welcome back to the consistently good podcast. I am your host, Jeff Cunningham. I'm super fired up about bringing this episode to you because this is the nuts, this is the bolts of coaching, this is something that's sort of central to the way I've coached and central to my processes, basically that I've employed in the last 25 years. I coached my first runner in late 2000 into 2001. I was just a young guy, I was just out of law school, I was 26 years old and coached my first high school runner. And then fast forward to today, obviously I coached multiple runners and we've had mostly success really for 25 years and central to what I've used for coaching has been critical velocity-paced workouts. And so I'm really excited to talk to you about this because I wanna explain the why, I wanna explain the how, I wanna explain the science, and also some of the art of coaching that actually goes into it where you don't have to be so completely adherent to very strict numbers and still be able to get the desired physiologic impact 'cause at the end of the day, at the end of the day, it's about making you all as fast as you can get. It's about you all maximizing your potential and it's about you all chasing down your goals and chasing down your dreams and central to that, obviously is me equipping with you all physiologically with the ability to do so. Now, critical velocity actually was not always a term that was known to me. I did not actually know that it was a thing. You could have called it gobbligook, you could have called it anything. But I, through a happy accident, sort of started using this because I found it to be effective. I got out of law school and I have a doctor of jurisprudence. I was a JD, still am a JD, so not an exercise physiologist, not a medical doctor, didn't have a PhD in exercise science. So I have to admit that even though I did a lot of reading and I consulted experts in the field, I consulted my mentors, I consulted other coaches, I even consulted athletes. A lot of it a little bit was trial and error to some degree when I was in my mid 20s. Now, keep in mind, we didn't have the vast resources that we have today exactly. The internet had not proliferated in a way where there was a ton of readily available scientific studies and treatises on running. The way it's just really at our fingertips now. To some degree, but not the way it is now. And so when I was coaching in the high school ranks, what I noticed was really, really hard, fast interval work, left people tired, dead-legged and fried. But then lots of really, really easy running, though mostly effective and could get you most of the way to where you wanted to be or where eight months wanted to be, didn't quite get us there. And so I decided, okay, I'm just gonna do, and I called 'em cruise intervals, okay? That's actually what I called it. Just sort of a generic term where you were just cruising along. Not sprinting, you didn't have blood scurrying out the corners of your eyes, right? But you also weren't out there just lolligagging like you would going out on a nice, easy run. And so I called 'em cruise intervals. Well, what I found out was that there was a thing and there was a pace that I was starting to assign and it actually had a label. And it was called critical velocity training. And so I did some research and started looking at sort of the science of it. And then all just started fitting together beautifully and explained the phenomenon that I noticed happening with my young runners that I didn't have the scientific knowledge, okay? Or the formal scientific training to be able to really recognize other than the fact this is a results oriented business. Like I always used to tell people, I don't wanna hear about the labor pains just show me the baby, right? You either ran fast, you either made all state, made it to the state meet, got a college scholarship, or you weren't good enough. How are we gonna get there, right? So it's interesting because critical velocity, which was sort of recognized back, oh man, starting back in the 1960s and into the 1970s, sort of went through several iterations, both in the science that was used in sort of addressing the topic and actually in the label that was applied to it. It was called critical speed. It was called critical power running. We call it critical velocity now. I think that for a period, people thought that it was maybe a faster pace than maybe what it was or what it is. And we've now sort of science it out. All the credit, all the credit goes to guys who are a lot smarter than me. I mean, guys who studied this for a living. I say guys because I'm referring to Dr. Joe Villagil and Dr. Jack Daniels and gentlemen, sort of in that era who were exercise physiologists, who started sort of looking at this pace in this intensity zone and realizing, hey, this is highly effective. We're not crushing our runners. We're not leaving them so neurologically fried that we just have all of the casing just stripped off of the wires till we just end up with a sort of diffuse, ineffective signal. And I think we're all sort of aware of the concept. We start talking about things like neuro muscular fatigue and it basically have this diffuse frayed a weak signal going from our brain, which is the central nervous system to our periphery, our legs, our extremities, which is go, right? And so you look at this pace and it is a pace that is reproducible. It can be done in relatively high volume. It can be done with relative frequency and is highly effective. Now, in looking at this, people just ask, okay, how is this training going to improve performance because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, that's all we're trying to do here. Whether it's sprint work, whether it's long runs, whether it's low volume training, high volume training, it's all in an effort to improve performance. That's why I coach it. That's how I coach it and that's what I coach is improve performance because if I'm not doing that, it's an incredible disservice to everybody. And so there's three major takeaways when people say why critical velocity training. One, you can expect to get what's referred to as fractional utilization of max VO2. You're not training at MVO2, but you're training close enough to 100% of your MVO2 pace, okay, which is a pace that you can run all out for about eight to 12 minutes. We can just call it generically 3K race pace for the purposes of this conversation, okay. You're not training quite at that pace, but close to it where you can engage, inverse referred to as fractional utilization, okay. The second thing is that you can chip away, okay, at your lactate threshold, without going all the way up to lactate threshold pace, which is slower than critical velocity pace, okay. And then three, you can expect to improve, okay, what's referred to as extensibility, okay. And just, inforrentially, you could see that extend is the root word here, what are we talking about? Elongating the distance that you can run at an increasing pace. In other words, run faster farther. That's extensibility and that is what we can expect to get if you train at critical velocity pace, as long as you have other things in your training that are in place as well, but that's beyond the purview of the conversation today. The central focus is critical velocity training is sort of a, the fulcrum is the focus, sort of the hub around which I have been able to take a high school runners to the national championships. Okay, I've been able to get marathoners to the United States Olympic trials. And I've been able to increase the paces at which people of all ages at all levels running all distances. I would say even from 800 meters, which is a half mile all the way up to the marathon. I've taken them to greater heights by employing critical velocity training as a central focus of what I do. Now, I'm going to go ahead and frame this in a way. So because sort of figure out where critical velocity training fits, sort of in, I don't want to say the hierarchy of running, but where it fits on sort of the list of kinds of running that we do. Now, for the purposes of this conversation, guys, and we could get into sort of some nuanced differences and sort of some interim paces, there's essentially six kinds of running that I employ and frankly, six kinds of running that I think typically exist in most training programs. One, you've got speed work. And when I say speed work, I mean pure anaerobic work that only engages your white fibers, which is your pure sprint fibers, which is your explosive white fibers. Typically at paces that are 110 to 120, I mean, even 130% of 100% of your MBO2, it's sprinting. When you think of it, it's anywhere from flying 40 yard dashes up to about 400 meter repeats, 100 meter reps, 150s, 200 meter reps. We're talking about fast running here. Two, you've got max field two pace running. There's long been lauded. It's sort of the optimal pace to run at if you want to improve your ability to run aerobically, but we know it's really hard. Because like I said, that's sort of like your 3K to 2 mile race pace for some people. It may be like you're one and a half mile race pace. It's a pace that you can run all out for 8 to 12 minutes. So if you think about that, and I think most people listening to this podcast have probably done enough running in their life to know, "If you're running all out for 8 to 12 minutes, that's really fast." And there's limits to how much training, how much training volume you can do at that pace. And then you get to critical velocity pace, okay? Which is sort of the third quote unquote, "tier," okay? Of running of the six kinds of running if we're going from fastest to slow is training. And then after that, we have lactate threshold training, okay? And of course lactate threshold training and anaerobic threshold synonyms, okay? It's the fastest pace that you can hold for running, oh gosh, about an hour, okay? So for some people that might be a little slower than 10K days up to the very, very elite runners in the world, that might be up to half marathon pace. We could call lactate threshold pace probably 10 mile race pace-ish for a large portion of the listening and viewing audience here, okay? And then you've got aerobic threshold pace, which is a pace you can run for two to three hours at a time, okay? We can call it marathon pace for extremely fast runners or something just a little bit faster than marathon pace for some people. And then you've got easy pace. Easy pace is, well, that's the running that we do for 75 to 85% of our running. Zone one, zone two, we're all pretty familiar with that. And so when we look at critical velocity pace, okay? And is popularized in the 80s and into the 90s and early 2000s in lots of training groups, training teams, lots of collegiate programs really, really adopted it, especially when high school youngsters graduate and they go up to the collegiate level, suddenly you're racing 5,000 meters and then 10,000 meters on the track, 10,000 meters cross country at like your regional and your NCAA championships, the men run 8K at their conference meets a lot. But we're talking about much longer races, right? And then critical velocity training sort of became sort of training to juror as people started realizing, this is a real effective way to train our runners without making them feel like they were just beaten by palliative hammers every day after practice. You could do more of it, right? Chris Papillon at University, California, Davis employed it and actually wrote fairly extensively on the topic and talked about Dr. V Hills sort of discovery. I think Dr. V Hill may have sort of said, hey, you get the most aerobic bang for your buck, for lack of a better way of putting it, it training at this pace. And Chris Papillon, when he was coaching at UC Davis, referred to this as the pace between. And why did it get this moniker that coach Papillon used? Well, it's between Max Vio to okay, and between like tape threshold, it's in the middle, right? And once again, from a scientific standpoint, the exercise physiologist looked at this and realized that you were able to get fractional utilization of MVO2 without actually training at MVO2. What does that mean? You can increase your MVO2. You can increase it without necessarily actually training right at it. Also, you can improve, right? Your lactate threshold, okay, without actually having to run out up at lactate threshold pace, which you could run a little faster than lactate threshold pace. And so, you know, it's like killing two birds with one stone. You have your Max Vio2 bird, you have your lactate or anaerobic threshold bird. And then you have the stone that we can throw right in the middle, which is critical velocity training. And you can actually improve both without training exactly at both, okay? Now, there's two things that we look at. When we look at the physiology, the sort of the adaptations, the changes that we can induce by training at critical velocity pace, okay? One, it improves the aerobic capacity of your type to a muscle fibers. Now, the tutorial very quickly just sort of re-re-mind us of what we're talking about when we're talking about muscle fibers. We have two big groups. And I talked about this previously in season one, when I did an entire podcast episode on types of quote, "speed training and uptempo training," where I ran through everything from speed work to aerobic threshold, okay? And as part of that discussion, I talked about the three kinds of muscle fibers, okay? Because there's actually three, even though we typically think of them in two big piles. Slow twitch, red fibers, they actually look reddish-pinkish under a microscope. And then you've got white fibers, which is fast twitch, explosive sprint fibers. But under the type two fibers, under those fast twitch fibers, you've got two kinds of fibers. You've got type two A, and you have type two B. Now, type two B, as I've talked about in the past, is simply explosive fibers. Those are fibers that you use. Like I said, when you're doing like a flying 40, right? When you're running from first base to second base, when you're trying to still second, right? Where you're running from home plate, trying to beat out ground ball, running the 60 meter dash and indoor track, the 100 meter dash, 200 meter dash and outdoor track, those almost exclusively use type two B fibers. Those will not perform aerobically, all right? They cannot be changed to be something that they're not, right? But type two A fibers can. They're often referred to as malleable fibers. And of course, we know malleable means changeable. You can sort of need it and massage it and help it morph into something different. It's malleable, right? Well, we know that critical velocity training is the most effective zone to train in to convert your type two A fibers. When left untrained, your type two A fibers, I would like to note, will only perform anaerobically. Top two A, type two B fibers will perform identically if there is no aerobic stimulus, if there is no aerobic massage for lack of a better way of putting it, your top two A fibers will maintain their white fiber explosive only state, but they're malleable so we can change them by massaging them with very strictly and very intentionally applied aerobic stimulus, but you got to do it in the correct zone. And how do we do it? Critical velocity training is the best. It's not the only way, but it is the most effective way and it's the most, like Dr. V Hill said, bang for your buck. And this is a pace that is about 89 up to 94% of MVO 2. Now here's where the art of coaching comes in. I think most scientists exercise physiologists and a lot of coaches will say that it's 89 or 90% up to about 92% of MVO 2. I have found simply by running the numbers on hundreds and thousands of athletes comparing practice paces to residual fatigue, to then looking at how the training translates into race day performance. I believe that you can push it up to 94, maybe even 95% of a runner's max V 0 2 pace in here's why. If you have somebody who's not naturally snappy, somebody who doesn't have the gift of massive white fibers that net them really positive results in really short races, the 100 meter dash, the 200, 400, even the 800 meters, what you're going to have is a runner who naturally runs really, really well at longer distances. It can hold paces for a long time, 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon, but then their race pace and they're all outpaced in 800 meter dash, 400 meter dash, even 200 meter dash is not is vastly disproportionate pace wise from their 5K pace is somebody who's more of a natural sprinter. Think of national champions, all Americans, at the high school level, collegiate level in the sprints, right? At some point you have some people who just have natural gifts that tend to make them more predisposed to being really adept in certain events than the others, right? And so I can push that up to 94% of a runner's MBO 2 safely without getting them flying so close to the sun, okay? The sun being 100% of their MBO 2 pace that they get neurologically fried and just beaten to hell for lack of a better way of putting it, okay? But we're talking about a pace that's 89 to 94% of your MBO 2. That's what we're talking about, all right? And we can then get those top 2 A fibers previously left untrained to then perform more like type 1 fibers. What are your type 1 fibers? Those are your pure anaerobic. They're really, really durable fibers that perform really, really well for long periods of time. Those type 1 fibers are the ones that we use when we're racing marathons, half marathons, ultra marathons. Frankly, those type 1 fibers are used un predominately even when you're racing 5Ks. And I know this is going to come as a shock, even racing the 2 mile or the 3K and even down to the mile. So how do we get an edge? How do we get an edge on our competition? We are trying to increase extensibility and extensibility is improved by taking those top 2 A fibers and getting them to perform more like your type 1 aerobic fibers that have a high hemoglobin content, okay, when you biopsy them, okay? And if you can get that to occur, okay? Then what you're going to have is a person who can run really far, really fast. And last time I checked, when we go to the starting line at the firecracker 5K, right, at the Tin Man 10K, right, or the master of the world marathon. What are we trying to do? We're trying to get to that damn finish line, faster than everybody else. And we as coaches, I don't think articulated really, really well. But at the end of the day, those type 2 A fibers and trying to get them to perform more aerobically when we're coaching distance races 5K to the marathon, okay? That's what we're trying to do. Now, you say, why is this so important? Well, if we look at, and we need to back up here, if we look at what actually happens, okay, my to-contrial respiration is what we're after. And what we know is this, loads and loads and loads of distance running, okay, at time, it's only one zone two will increase my to-contrial density, my to-contrial is basically the answer that makes the cells go, okay? The more my to-contrial you have, the better chance you have of being able to run farther and run faster. But it requires my to-contrial respiration. My to-contrial respiration is improved by running faster than easy run pace, okay? Typically, not sprinting because you're going to shut down your aerobic pathways. And typically, once you start running anaerobically, you've got about a minute, maybe 90 seconds of good running left before you fall off a cliff. So what we're trying to do is improve my to-contrial respiration. And how we do that is is getting the my to-contrial that we've built through loads and loads of zone one and zone two running 70, 80, 85% of our total training load, okay? And the my to-contrial respiration is incrementally improved by running at pace's faster than easy run pace. We will improve my to-contrial respiration by running at critical velocity pace. And they're the most effective paces in taking those top two a-malleable fibers, getting them to work more aerobically, which means that my to-contrial respiration is to conduit through which we convert oxygen into energy. And that's what we're trying to do, okay? Now, when do we do a critical velocity session? We can do critical velocity sessions. A huge part of our year, a huge part of our training cycle. Once again, it's because it's not sprint work where you have you can do very, very little of it actually effectively, okay? Max VO2 work, you can do more of that in sprint work, but you still have to be really careful about your volume because that's really hard running. It you typically would do MVO2 work on a one-to-one recovery. In other words, if you do an 800 meter at 100% of your MVO2 pace, let's say you run it in three minutes, well then you're going to have to then take three-minute recovery, okay? So you have tons of recovery. You can't do a ton of it because it's just going to rip you to shreds if you try to do too much of it, okay? Now, we go up to critical velocity pace. We can do much more volume of it. We can do it much more frequently. And the athlete feels sufficiently challenged in an almost bizarrely enjoyable way, but then doesn't feel like they're about to have to drop and roll around on the ground like a skull to the earth, or I'm rolling around in your own spit, okay? You know, you might go, "Woof, that was pretty difficult." And then looks at your teammates and say, "All right, let's go cool down." And that's it, right? And when you have that feeling, then what happens is the next day, you can roll back, go out for a nice, easy run, and not feel really, really jacked up for lack of a better way of putting it, okay? You don't need massive amounts of recovery. And so that's why you can do it pretty effectively for a large part of your training blocks. I would say in a marathon block, you could start doing critical velocity work, even I don't know, 10, 12 weeks out from race day, 13 weeks out, and do it safely. You can do it once a week or once every 14 days. I like to do it once every 14 days, especially when you're doing marathon training, right? Because we have some needs up at the lactate threshold level and even the aerobic threshold level that we need to take care of. So I would say maybe once every 14 days, but man, from my high school athletes, Many times during training cycles, especially during the the winner in the early part of the season and coming out of late summer, okay, into the mid part of cross country season for even Calisod athletes and high school athletes, do it once a week, okay, because it's just not going to beat you up. It's just not going to beat you up and you're going to get massive, massive, physiologic gains, biotoconjural respiration, increasing extensibility by converting these type 2A fibers in that malleable sense into something that works more like an aerobic type 1 fiber. And I tell you what, when you actually look, actually look at the composition of the races, I think people are shocked. And this is what I tell people. If you're 5K training and you're 10K training and you're have marathon training, don't all look pretty similar and have major components of them that look a lot like your marathon training, you're probably not doing it right. Why the central component of performance in a distance race is being able to run aerobically as long as possible. The marathon 99.9% aerobic, I'm in its composition when we look at the system that you are actually accessing. Half marathon, you're at about 97 to 98%. In the 10K, you're at 93 to 95%. Some physiologists will even push that up to 96%. Okay, 5K? Oh, you know, 10K, like I said, 93 to 97, 5K, 92%. Okay, even to race the 3K, you're at 88 to 90% and the mile 1500, you're still it. Like, I don't know, 80%, 78 on the low end, up to 85% on the high end for some estimates. So you can see that the majority of your training needs to be aerobically based or you're literally failing yourself. And as a coach, you're failing your athletes by failing to simply address the basic physiologic needs to get them as close to the finish line as possible before they quote, go lactic or start running anaerobically at which point you've got a very limited amount of time before you ask the athlete or your athlete, if you're coaching them, will follow off what I referred to as the aerobic cliff. All right. And so when we look at why you're going to do this, well, if you are training your athletes and you say, well, why would I do this? Why is this pace? So effective. Well, when you train at MVO 2 pace, it's very specific to MVO 2. And it's not particularly specific to improving your lactate threshold and your aerobic threshold. We can call them the thresholds. Okay. If you train only at lactate threshold or anaerobic threshold as it were synonyms, then it's very, very specific to lactate and anaerobic threshold and not particularly specific and won't chip away, won't improve necessarily your max V.O. 2. What we know through the study of the exercise physiologist is that if you train at critical velocity pace, okay, you're going to be able to improve your MVO 2, improve your lactate threshold. Okay. And it will allow you to, like I said, kill those two birds with one stone at the collegiate level and the professional level and all the way down to the high school level when you look at sort of like your 10 K runners, right? You could call critical velocity pace 10 K pace, but frankly, I find it to be a little bit slower than 10 K pace for a lot of your really fast runners, okay? But then for some of your runners, it can be sort of a pace that they can hold maybe actually 25 minutes. So when we're looking at critical velocity pace, it's a pace that you can hold. I would say from 25 up to 38 minutes, pushing it on the high end up to 40 minutes. That's the pace you're training at, okay? Once again, training at LT is great. I mean, you're going to get really fit, but it's very one dimensional, okay? And it has a place, I think in most training programs, it has a place in almost every training program, but just understand you're not going to improve your MACS VIO 2, okay? By training at LT, and the danger that we run by giving a straight MVO 2 workout in the middle of a really important week or middle of a really important, like, fortnight of training or a month of training is that you are increasing your recovery times, training at MVO 2 pace. So you don't want to do it all the time or every week or you're just going to end up having a lot of really tired runners. You're going to risk inducing peripheral neuromuscular fatigue and you can end up having a regression unintentionally by sort of reaching out and getting that dislocated shoulder that we get by trying to reach out and go and grab fitness in a way that may not be the most physiologically responsible or the most physiologically effective way of going and getting it done. I've talked a lot about the science of it. Jeff, what does one of these workouts look like? Well, here we go. Typically, your reps are going to be anywhere from, I would say, about 2K on the high end, 2,000 meters, 1.25 miles, right? Down to 800 meters, maybe 600 meters on the low end, maybe a few reps now and again, but really 800 meters is sort of where you would really want to stop it in most interests. I think for high school athletes, we can go down to 600 and then even for post-collegiate runners who are training for half marathon, some marathon, throwing a few 600s at the tail end of a workout, but really distances 2K down to 800 is where this is. Instead of doing a one-to-one ratio on your recovery, this is what you have to do for MVO2 pace running. I think the Yasuo workout, all that is, is just MVO2, 800s where you're doing a one-to-one recovery. That's not what this is. This is one minute of recovery per 1,000 meters ish, I say ish, run is sort of the amount of recovery you want to take in critical velocity workout. Now, you can get into the ridiculousness of going, "Okay, well, eight hundred meters is eight tenths of a thousand." So what is eight tenths of 60 seconds? So let's go and let's rest for 48 seconds or something like that, right? Now, that's silliness. We're not going to get into all that. Basically, about a minute of recovery if you're doing an 800 meter or a 1K rep, if you're doing a 1200 or a 1500 meter rep, maybe go a minute and a half on your recovery and then you can go up to 2 minutes on your 2K. You don't have to be that exacting. You're just going to make yourself crazy sitting here and doing like little fractions of minutes to account for the difference of 100 or 200 meters between a rep. Basically, a minute of recovery per 1,000 meters run ish suffice. Do it at about 89 to 94% of MVO2 pace. Like, well, how do I do that? A couple of good ways that you can do it, without having to go into a lab and have them prick your fingers and figure out what 100% of MVO2 is based on blood lactate levels and all of that. I don't think that that's absolutely necessary because at that point, we're trying to be so exacting that we're sort of losing side of the fact that as long as we're in the right range, as long as we're in the right range and practice, your body is going to get the physiologic adaptation. So we're going to be okay. So here's the two ways I think the most effective way to calculate your critical velocity pace. One, go out and run for 10 minutes literally all out. Figure out what that pace is and then run your repeats in a critical velocity workout at about 90 to 93, 94% of that pace. If you want to do it even easier way, that I found particularly effective with my high school runners and frankly, I find it pretty effective for almost every runner is 85% of all out one mile race pace. Four laps for runner track is 1600 meters. It's basically a mile. 85% of that is 1,360 meters. So you take the pace that you can run all out for a mile and then take that pace and then take that amount of time and put it at 360 meters, which will be a much slower pace because you're only covering 1,360 meters in the pace in the time that you would run for a whole mile and that's going to be your pace. Any questions about that, you will reach out to me and I'll give you the easy way to calculate it. 85% of mile race pace, 90 to 93, 94% of the pace that you can run all out for 10 minutes, you're going to get about pretty close to the same thing. And then what do you do? Volume. anywhere from oh my gosh for a high school athlete you may do as little as 5k of work at that pace okay and it might be five times a thousand meters it might be a cut down where you go 1500 meters 1413 1200 1100 a thousand however you want to do it five to six k of work for an advanced high school athlete i think you can go all the way up to safely up to seven eight thousand meters of work at critical velocity pace on one minute of recovery uh uh per thousand meters run ish like i said you're fine for uh beginning marathoners and half marathoners you can start out at about six to seven thousand meters of work and then we can work our way up to 14 000 meters of work no problem at all you know seven by a two k 14 times a thousand i've been known to brutalize people with you know 15 times 800 meter repeats at critical velocity pace with one minute of recovery and when i say one minute i've found it to be perfectly satisfactory to just walk in circles for a minute you don't need to jog you don't need to do up downs in between your reps you don't need to go and do high knees and burpees and all no uh uh just walk around in a circle for a minute go back to the starting line hit another rep avoid the tempting uh sort of sort of a lure of getting faster and faster and faster now listen if your effort level is at a six to a seven maybe goes to an eight by the end of your workout you're in a safe zone when i say an eight i mean an eight out of ten on your effort scale one being basically walking briskly to ten being all out race pace for something that i would say is maybe like a three k to five k all out race effort that's really intense keep your upper level at like a six to an eight throughout this workout if you started a six you can finish it in eight as blood lactate levels maybe don't completely completely clear in the one minute between reps you're probably in a safe zone but like i said you don't want to do anything more than put your hands on your ships and your hips to go woof maybe spit one good lugi on the side of the track and take off and cool down that's about what we want okay you can do it in two k's one k's eight hundreds you can run 12k uh 1200 meter reps i had a guy down in san tonio just today go out and run um uh ten by 1200 meter reps right and did them on about a minute and a half recovery boom knocked it out all right now if you do want to get just a little tiny bit of true actual speed work and this is just the nuances this is the art of coaching go out and run four 200 meter uh uh reps fast on the tail end with copious recoveries in between no real rules for the amount of recovery you can take a minute and a half two minutes help take three minutes in between them doesn't matter go out run four maybe five times a hundred and fifty meter quickly after doing a set of nine ten times one k reps at 90 to 94 percent of your embryo two pace and you'll be fine you can do this workout maybe once a week i would advocate that if you're training for half marathon's marathon's maybe do it once every 14 days throughout your training block and i'm telling you you will reap the rewards of doing this you will increase your extensibility for lack of a better way of putting it you will feel fitter and faster than you ever have been in it's actually going to net you more gains than going and doing ripping a bunch of 300 and 400 to 200 meter reps because i'm here to tell you that kind of training while it feels fun while it satisfies sort of our need to go back to our high school football days of running wind sprints and and doing that kind of training it's not going to help you very much on the um six and seventh laps of a two mile race on the track of year in high school it's not going to help you at the beginning of the third mile of a five k it won't help you that much when you enter miles nine and ten of your half marathon right because it's not going to create extensibility because you will not have trained those top two a fibers to work their way toward type one fibers and if you spend a whole lot of time doing real sort of tempo-e stuff and when i say tempo-e stuff that's a non-scientific term for paces between lactate threshold and aerobic threshold while it feels comfortable and pacy and doesn't challenge us anaerobically at all sometimes that training can get us to a really really really good spot to get us right over that hunt we haven't really worked on our extensibility and so the problem is is when the gun goes off and we're running quite a bit faster than that in the early miles of a race our system for lack of a better way of putting it is going to kind of get short circuited we're going to feel overloaded and we're going to feel quote unquote gassed okay what does gassed mean well oxygen is a gas right and when we are not getting mitochondrial respiration anymore because we're running and aerobically without oxygen we feel quote unquote gassed okay and so training critical velocity pays in letting it creep in and sitiously it won't be overnight it won't happen in two weeks because start getting gains in six weeks eight weeks training this way then what happens is we're going to be able to run farther and faster and still run aerobically and at the end of the day that is the name of the game you all have any questions about this always feel free to reach out I love talking to you guys I love talking about this and nerding out on the science of it but also nerding out on the practical applications of this training in the real world whether it's in hot climates cold climates altitude climates training for the mile that's coming up in six weeks or training for the marathon that's coming up in sixteen we stir our considerations there but it's highly effective it's scientifically endorsed there is evidence based um literature out there that holy supports that this is a critical zone that you can train in to improve everything like I've said even your eight hundred but especially your mile time I've had high schoolers run four eleven in the mile training like this all winter I've had women run two twenty eight in the marathon doing this I've had men run two oh not in the marathon doing this I've had high school girls run four forty four in the mile training this way it works all right I want y'all to put this into practice I want you all to try to apply this where you can okay listen to your coaches listen to your mentors listen to your colleagues and your confidence let's employ this let's all go and be the best we can all right everybody now I'm going to go into coaches mailbag this is what I do after every podcast and I'm doing it after I've thrown up questions actually to you guys on Instagram so I'm going into the mailbag and I'm going to see what you guys have given me during this episode let's see what do we got here oh I like this JDH 102 do you see the BAA lowering the qualifying times again in the future that's a good question the BAA for those of you who do not know is the Boston Athletic Association they are in charge of the Boston marathon hot topic recently has been how fast qualifying times have gotten and how difficult it's become to qualify for the Boston marathon and the reality is even with them carving out some of the downhill marathons like the revel races and the things with a lot of net drop where the BAA has sort of instituted sort of a time penalty for running those races fast we still are getting the highest number of Boston marathon qualifiers that we've ever gotten in history the Boston marathon has a set number of slots that they can frankly safely and effectively allow onto the streets so the answer is going to be yes I don't anticipate people getting slower or the number of applicants receding I don't see that right now you have to run five minutes faster typically then the stated time right to get into the Boston marathon for your age group and keep in mind that stated time has been dropped by five minutes by the BAA in the last couple of years and so I do see it getting faster I think for instance for like the youngest men's age group I think it's going to take under 250 to qualify possibly in the next year but I think in the next two to three years I think it's going to take 248 249 mid probably to qualify which is astounding and so you can say it's a good thing or it's a bad thing I don't characterize it either way it's just a thing Boston is going to have the number of participants that they want out there on the course, the faster people get, the more or qualifying times come in, then they're going to have to simply just keep lowering those standards in order to keep the size of the field the same. So good luck, everybody train hard, everybody lean into yourselves, lean into your ability, dream big, let's chase after these goals, it's going to get faster and faster, but so will you. Good luck everybody. Alright, I hope everybody's gotten something out of this. This was a really, really fun conversation on the subject's nearing dear to my heart. I want y'all to go be good, but more importantly, go be consistently good. Coach out.