Workouts: 16x200M at 5K pace

Coach Joe English

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

Workout: 16x200M @ 5K Pace

Workout Summary: One of the tricky things about speed workouts is balancing the need to a marathon runner running faster without having them sprint at top speed. The 200M interval is actually a great distance for a lot of reasons — for one thing everyone from beginners to the most advanced runners can get and keep their speed up for 200 meters. In addition, the distance is short enough that 200s are a nice mental break on days when runners are recovering or just mentally tired — they just “feel” short.

The main reason to use a 200 meter interval is to work on your quicker running speed. But keep in mind that since most of us are training for longer distances, such as the marathon or half-marathon, we don’t want to sprint these 200s. Instead, you’ll run more of them and run them at your 5K pace, which should be hard, but sustainable over three miles under race conditions.

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