Stop Calling It Speed Work: Teach Race Pace Instead

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If you coach high school distance runners and you tell your team, "Today we're doing a speed workout," I have a question for you. What do you mean by that?

Most coaches use the term. That's fine. It's common language in our sport. But I want to walk through what the word actually means, because a better term changes how you and your athletes think about the work.

Do the Math

Let's use some easy numbers. Say you have boys who can run 4:40 for 1600 meters and girls who can run 5:20. Break those races down and here's what you get:

• 4:40 boy: 70-second 400s, 35-second 200s
• 5:20 girl: 80-second 400s, 40-second 200s, 20-second 100s

That isn't fast.

Don't hear what I'm not saying. Holding 80s for four laps is hard. Race pace is demanding. But demanding and fast aren't the same thing. A 35 or a 40 for 200 meters is a pace worth practicing. It just isn't speed. If you run a set of 400s at those paces and call it speed work, the label doesn't match the workout.

Now take a bigger jump, but follow me because the math is easy again. Say that 5:20 girl could someday run 2:12 for 800 meters.

• 2:12 for 800m: 66-second 400s, 33-second 200s, 16.5-second 100s

That's a big leap from 5:20, and I'm using it to make a point, not to set a goal. For a high school girl, 33-second 200s are getting faster. When we go from 1600 meter pace down to 800 meter pace, we're getting faster.

Notice the word I keep using. Pace.

What Speed Actually Looks Like

Let's go all the way to the other end of the continuum. This one's a little intense.

You're at an intersection. A child starts to walk into the street, and there are cars coming. What do you do? You sprint, grab the child, and run to the other side.

That's speed. That's the fastest a human can run.

Nobody holds it for long. When you watch the 100 meters at the U.S. championships, the world championships, or the Olympics, you're watching three phases. There's an acceleration, a stretch at max velocity, and then a deceleration. The best sprinters in the world delay that deceleration, or their deceleration isn't as steep. Even they can't run their fastest for all 100 meters.

Should distance runners train that way? That's a separate conversation, and it's one I'd like to have at some point. For now, here's the distinction I care about. When your kids sprint all-out for a short distance, something like 40 meters, that's much closer to speed development. Their 1600 meter pace 400s are something else.

Call It Race Pace Work

In Consistency Is Key, the book I wrote for high school runners, there's a chapter built around one idea: you've got to run race pace or faster. The book doesn't give training plans to kids, so it isn't going to run counter to what you teach. It supports it. The goal is to get athletes thinking, "I've got to run race pace or faster."

Let's go back to our 5:20 girl. Her PR works out to 80-second 400s. To run faster, she has to practice running faster than 80s. Here's what those steps look like, along with one for our 4:40 boy:

• 79s: 5:16 for 1600m
• 78s: 5:12 for 1600m
• 68s: 4:32 for 1600m

I really like 78 for this girl, because four 78-second 400s is 5:12. How exciting is that?

Same for the boy. He's running 70s. Could he run 68s? Say you have a sophomore who ran 4:40 last year and put in a really nice winter. If he runs 4:32, that's a nice jump. Sure, we're hoping for 4:28 and breaking 4:30, but 8 seconds in a year is really good.

These are example athletes, not targets for everyone on your team. Your job is to find the right numbers for your own kids.

Either way, those 78s and 68s are practice for the race they're chasing. They aren't speed work. They're race pace work.

Where I Learned It: 300s in Boulder

My first introduction to this concept came in college at the University of Colorado. I ran on the 1998 team Chris Lear wrote about in Running with the Buffaloes. You don't need to read it. It's really about two people. One is Adam Goucher, who wins the NCAA cross country championship. The other is our coach, Mark Wetmore. But there's a workout in there that nobody has ever asked me about, and it's very simple.

First, the setting. Boulder sits at roughly a mile of elevation. That's solidly at altitude. If you came from sea level and ran on the flat Boulder Creek Path, you might not notice it. Once you started going uphill, you'd definitely notice it. And if you raced any distance from the mile up to the marathon, you'd absolutely feel it.

That creates a problem. College men race 8,000 meters in cross country, and 10,000 at the regional and national championships. College women race 6,000. If you want to practice sea-level race pace in Boulder with something like repeat 2Ks, you can, but you're going to have to take a lot of rest.

So here's the workout. You're on a field where the perimeter is about 300 meters. Run 300 meters at sea-level cross country race pace. Then run 200 meters back across the field. Then another 300. Then 200 back.

The first time I did it, maybe as a sophomore, I got to that 200 and thought, we're not recovering at all. We called it a jog, but it wasn't. The 200 is what we'd call a steady pace, and the whole thing feels more like a fartlek than a set of repeats. The 300s stay at race pace.

That's why it works at altitude. A 300 is short enough to hit sea-level race pace without the long rest a 2K would demand, and the steady 200 keeps the work going. Each 300 plus 200 is 500 meters, so two of them make 1,000. You do it over and over. A college runner could accumulate 10,000 or 12,000 meters of that work and touch race pace again and again.

It worked. We had a really good cross country team. Later, after two years as a junior college coach, I came back to CU as an assistant cross country coach, and Coach Wetmore still had the cross country kids running 300s at race pace with the 200 in between. Seeing it from the coach's side, I really understood the workout.

That was a college workout built for a college problem. The principle travels. The volume doesn't.

Race Pace Builds Belief

Years later I coached Brent Vaughn, a professional runner who won the U.S. cross country championships. We did that same workout pretty close to the race. I'm recalling the details from a long time ago, so hold them loosely. I think it was about 10 days out, maybe closer to seven. I remember a lot of loops, something like 20. I remember the total being at least 10K of work, maybe 12 or 14K. I don't trust my memory on the exact numbers. For a professional, that might not sound like a lot. It was.

Because he could nail that workout, I knew he was fit enough to run that race. More importantly, he knew he was fit enough.

That's why race pace matters.

Brent's workout isn't a recipe for your high school team. The lesson is what carries over. When an athlete can hit the pace they need in practice, they walk into the race believing they can hit it again.

The Same Idea in the Marathon

A long time ago, I wrote a book for adult marathoners called Simple Marathon Training. I don't coach adult runners now, and I'm not suggesting your high school kids train like marathoners. But the principle in that book belongs in this conversation.

If you want to run 3:30 for the marathon, you need to dial in a pace a little faster than 3:30 pace, and you need to do it all the time. If your Boston qualifier is 3:15, the book teaches you to groove 3:10.

Is 3:30 marathon pace fast? No. Even six-minute mile pace, which works out to about a 2:37 marathon, means roughly 90-second 400s and 45-second 200s. It isn't fast. It's something you have to maintain for a long time. So you practice it.

The adults in that book also built the aerobic engine, strengthened the chassis with post-run work, and revved the engine with strides on their easy days. But the big unlock, the reason the book has helped so many people, was grooving a pace a little faster than goal pace.

Those are adult marathon examples. The paces and the training don't belong on a high school plan. The idea does.

Where In-and-Outs Fit

I like something called 150 in-and-outs. They're three 50-meter pieces:

1. Build in. Line up on the curve, roughly even with a field goal post, which is about halfway around the curve. Build up for 50 meters.
2. Run fast. Put one cone at the 100 meter start and another in the middle of the homestretch. Run fast for the 50 meters between them.
3. Run out. Let your momentum carry you the last 50 meters to the finish line.

Build in, run fast, run out.

That's much closer to speed. If you told me, "Jay, we do speed development, and we do in-and-outs," I'd give you an A-minus or a B-plus. True speed development is more of that max velocity work.

Either way, it isn't the same thing as the 78s and 68s.

Common Mistakes

Calling race pace reps speed work. A 5:20 girl running 80s isn't running fast. She's practicing the pace she needs to race. Name it that way.

Confusing hard with fast. Race pace work is demanding, and your athletes will feel it. It still isn't max speed. Keep the two ideas separate so your words match the work.

Leaving race pace undefined. If your athletes have to practice race pace or faster, you as the coach have to identify what race pace is. "Run hard" isn't a pace. 80s, 79s, and 78s are.

Skipping the next logical step. Coach Wetmore talked about the next logical step. For a 5:20 girl, that might be 5:16, which moves her from 80s to 79s. A long stretch goal this year might be 78s and 5:12, with all the times in between. Now she has a goal she knows she can reach and a stretch goal to chase.

Copying the example instead of the principle. The Boulder 300s were a college workout. Brent's session was for a professional. The marathon paces are for adults. Each one teaches the same idea, but none of them is a high school prescription.

Treating race pace as the whole plan. Even in the marathon example, race pace worked alongside building the aerobic engine, strengthening the chassis with post-run work, and revving the engine with strides. Whether you're coaching adults or high school athletes, those pieces still matter. If you want to see how I build the engine with challenging aerobic workouts, read The Best High School Cross Country Workouts. For revving the engine, start with my article on strides.

Your Early-Season Question

Here in Colorado, official high school practice starts the last week of February. A team might run a time trial at the end of February, another at the beginning of March, and a low-key meet the second week of March before a big invitational the third week of March.

So here's the question to carry into those first efforts. What race pace should your athletes be identifying? Use those early races to learn where your 4:40 boy and your 5:20 girl are right now. Then pick the next logical step and groove a pace that's one step faster.

The same thinking works in cross country. In my article on race pace work before NXR, I apply it to a runner who needs to groove a faster pace for a faster course late in the season. If you coach track and want a full season built on this idea, that's what the Track Training System is for.

Change the Word

Take speed work out of your vocabulary and replace it with race pace work. Short, all-out sprints are speed, and in-and-outs get close. When your athletes run 400s at 79s or 68s, they're rehearsing the race they want to run.

If your athletes haven't read Consistency Is Key, the chapter on running race pace or faster is exactly what we've been talking about. You can also read some free chapters of the book.

We're not doing speed work. We're doing race pace work.