Coach Joe English

This is week five in our continuing series of favorite speed workouts. If you’re looking for the earlier posts, they are all filed in the category called “workouts”.

Workout: Interval Pyramids or Pyramid Workdouts

Workout Summary: The pyramid is really a whole class of workouts in which you will run progressively longer intervals followed by progressively shorter ones. If you were to chart out the distances of the intervals, they look like a pyramid with the distances getting longer on one side (200M, 400M, 800M, 1,200M) and then getting shorter on the other (1,200M, 800M, 400M, 200M). What’s nice about this type of workout is that the progressively longer nature of the up side of the pyramid means will mean that each interval generates more running while fatigued (a good thing) and the down side allows you to mentally get relief as the intervals get shorter.

Pyramids are also nice, because they can be configured in many different ways to keep them fresh and fun. For example, on days when you are looking to extenuate distance, you might start the intervals longer (1,200, 1,600, 2,000) and on days when looking for more speed start them shorter (50M, 100M, 200M, 400M). They aren’t as boring a running countless reps of the same interval over and over again either.

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