Tuesday Speed Sessions

Anyone who has read about training schedules and programmes will know that a speed session is one of the essential elements for those who ultimately want to become faster runners.

So why is a speed session good for you? Basically, what we try to do in a speed session is take people out of their comfort zone by getting them to run at a faster-than-race-pace for a short period. This improves your fitness in several ways:
- increases your V02 max (the amount of oxygen you can take in and use effectively)
- increases your lactate threshold (the point at which you are producing more lactic    acid than you can get rid of)
- gets your legs used to moving faster

Put simply, we encourage you to put yourself in a situation that mimics that point in a race when your legs are heavy and tired and your lungs are bursting - but because it’s over a short period you don’t suffer for days afterwards. Remember the coaching adage ‘train hard, race easy’, that’s what we are aiming for.

We aim to make the sessions 45 mins long divided into 3 phases of:1) warm up; 2) effort; 3) warm down. Ideally this is 10 mins warm up, 20 mins of repetitions (with a recovery between efforts) and 10 mins warm down. This leaves 5 mins to float between the three phases. In the winter we start at 6.45pm from SiD and use various routes within Desford, the sessions are rotated to include hill reps and flat road sprints. We try to get back to SiD for 7.30pm. In the summer we meet at 6.45pm at Bosworth College and train on the grass track.

Groups are usually mixed ability in terms of pace so we often set the faster runners off last to even things out. Participants run as hard as they want but the aim is to make every rep a similar effort rather than go flat out on the first rep and ‘collapse in a heap’ on the last!

If you would like more information on the speed sessions, contact Phil Lord on 01455 823368 or phil.lord1@btinternet.com