The gap between easy and fast

Back in June I wrote that tempo sits at 70 to 75 percent, and that pushing past that puts you in the worst place you can be. Too hard to recover from, too easy to make you any faster.

I stand by that. But it leaves an obvious hole, because there is a whole category of sprint training that lives above that line on purpose. It is called intensive tempo, and coaches a lot better than me have built world records on top of it.

So let me deal with the hole properly.

Here is the map. Below 75 percent you have tempo, the easy stuff, the session I was writing about in June. Above 95 percent you have speed and speed endurance, the work that actually looks like racing.

In between sits a band, roughly 75 to 95 percent, and intensive tempo is what lives in it. Reps somewhere between fifteen and ninety seconds, run on rest that is deliberately too short.

The first thing worth knowing about that band is that it produces the highest perceived effort of anything in a sprinter's week. Coaches who use it will tell you these are the most unpleasant sessions their athletes ever do. Not the speed work. This.

Which creates a specific problem, because effort and intensity are not the same thing, and this is where they come apart hardest.

Eighty-five percent still looks quick from the side of the track, and it feels like death by rep six, so it gets filed as hard training.

Then the name has "tempo" in it, so on another week the same athlete files it as an easy day. It ends up being both and neither.

I don't think the useful question is whether intensive tempo is good. The useful question is what your plan is for that band, because every serious programme I have looked at has one, and they flatly disagree with each other.

Here are three.

Charlie Francis decided to leave it empty.

There is a chart in his book showing his approach across the four months before the Los Angeles Olympics.

Tempo running is marked at 75 percent. Speed work is marked at 95 percent or higher. The volume of both stays fairly steady from April through to August. Nothing in the middle, for the entire run-in to the biggest meet of the year.

That is the high-low system in one picture, and it is a bigger commitment than it first looks.

He is not claiming the middle is useless in theory.

He is saying that if you want a genuine maximum speed stimulus in every single training week, and you want your athletes to survive doing it, everything else has to sit far enough away from it to stay out of the way.

Seventy-five percent is far enough away. Eighty-five is not.

And Francis knew perfectly well what he was leaving out.

Among the coaches he learned from was Gerard Mach, whose Polish sprinters won every sprint at the 1966 European Championships.

He had the whole Eastern European tempo tradition available to him, from some of the finest sprint minds in the world, and he still decided his sprinters were better off with an empty middle.

Clyde Hart went the other way.

He walks into the band, slowly, over about six months.

Hart's programme has one session type called Tempo Endurance. He describes it as aerobic, quantity over quality, short rest, and says the point is that the runner learns rhythm.

Which sounds exactly like the session I was describing in June.

Then you look at what it actually is across a year.

His sample sessions are written for a runner capable of around 46 seconds, which by his own reckoning means a 200 best somewhere near 21.

In the autumn, the session is ten 200s at 30 seconds with two minutes rest. Indoors it becomes eight at 28 off three minutes. By early season it is six at 26. By the end of the year it is three at 26.

Ten reps become three. Thirty seconds becomes twenty six. Do the arithmetic and the session starts the year at roughly 71 percent and finishes at roughly 82.

Hart never once writes the words intensive tempo.

He does not need the category, because he does not treat it as a separate session.

He has one session and he moves the clock, and somewhere around March it crosses into a different kind of training without ever changing its name.

I think that is genuinely clever.

I also think it is the part that gets lost when a Hart session is lifted off the internet.

Ten 200s off two minutes is not a workout.

Ten 200s off two minutes, at a stated pace, in a stated month, is a workout. Copy the first and you have copied only the packaging.

The third answer is to run both, every week, and keep them apart.

ALTIS published a full season for an elite 200 runner, and their weeks carry extensive tempo on one day and intensive tempo on another.

Both are named on the plan explicitly, cycle after cycle.

The intensive session gets quicker as the season goes on, in much the same way Hart's does, but the slow one never goes anywhere. It sits there cycle after cycle doing its own separate job.

So Francis says pick a side. Hart says migrate across. ALTIS says these are two different tools and you want both in the box.

What actually decides it is your event, and what the rest of your week is trying to protect.

Francis was building 100 metre runners around a maximum speed stimulus that had to be defended at all costs. In that world the middle band is a tax on the only quality that really matters.

Hart was building quarter-milers. The 400 is a lactic problem before it is a speed problem, and the runner has to become comfortable somewhere deeply uncomfortable. Work in that band is not a distraction from the event. It is close to being the event.

The longer your race, the more that band earns its keep. That is the honest rule of thumb.

None of which tells you what to do during your session, so let me be direct about it.

Pick one of the three and run it properly.

If you are a 100 runner, or you train around speed and you are already scraping to recover, Francis's answer is a perfectly good one to take.

Keep tempo genuinely easy, keep speed genuinely fast, stay out of the middle.

If you are a 200 or 400 runner, you want to be in that band at some point in the year, and the version I would steal is Hart's. Do not bolt a new session onto your week.

Take the tempo session you already run and put it on a schedule. A little quicker and a little shorter every few weeks, so the runs you were jogging through in October are being properly run by March.

What you should not do is the fourth option.

No plan for the band whatsoever. Arriving in it by accident because the first few reps felt easy and the legs were willing, then wondering why the speed session felt flat.

There is a line in Francis's book I think about more than almost anything else I have read on coaching.

Some of the best coaches the sport has ever had looked at the same twenty percent band and did three completely different things with it. All three were right, because all three knew exactly what the goal of their training was.

Do you know what yours is?