Speedwork helps, there's no doubt. But I don't know if I'd say "drastically". I personally am just slow. Even at peak Ironman fitness, 8:00 miles for a 5k was me running hard. I'll admit I never did "sprints" and my focus was on longer distances, but did a lot of 1/4 mile repeats along with 5, 8, 10, 12 minute intervals at high tempo pace. No doubt it helped my overall times. I easily broke 2 hours for a half marathon beating my previous best by like 15 minutes. But it was still like a 8:58 pace. Some of that performance can definitely be attributed to speedwork, but a lot was just a huge increase in fitness. Speedwork won't turn a 10:00 easy pace person into a 7:30 easy pace person overnight. It takes years of base miles.

Genetically speaking, some people can do it out of the gate and some can't. I have pretty decent endurance ability. I can keep adding miles. I have a tough time getting faster though. My average HR is in 160's on an easy run and up around 190-200 on a hard run. Wheras you have good runners redlining at 150.

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Posted by Salmon

On the trails

Member since Feb 2008

83668 posts

Posted on 7/18/18 at 10:27 am to KG6

quote:
Some of that performance can definitely be attributed to speedwork, but a lot was just a huge increase in fitness. Speedwork won't turn a 10:00 easy pace person into a 7:30 easy pace person overnight. It takes years of base miles.

Correct. But speedwork will help your overall fitness moreso than just the same tempo runs. Speedwork works different muscles.

It took me a solid year to bring my 5k time down from 21 minutes to 19 minutes.

But I attribute that to speedwork. I wasn't getting faster just running the same distance at the same speed every day.

Plus speedwork is just plain fun