I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with interval training. I hate pushing myself through some really hard intervals, but I love the feeling when they are over and I especially love the resulting improvement in my general running!

The idea of Interval Training is to run at your race pace (or faster) for a specified distance, interspersed with recovery-pace jogs to reduce the stress on the body. This is widely considered to be the best way to improve race performances – superior to Tempo (steady, hard) runs. It can teach you to tolerate higher levels of discomfort, which will benefit you during a race.

The general principle is to run shorter intervals with more repetitions for shorter races, and longer intervals with fewer repetitions for longer races. However, you will benefit from a mixture of long and short interval sessions in your program. This is because the shorter intervals will help build speed and power, while longer intervals (necessarily run at a slower pace) will help improve endurance and stamina.

If you have access to a running track, a typical sprint interval may be from one to four laps of the track (400m to 1600m). I do not have this facility, but fortunately it is also a trivial matter to structure an interval session on a treadmill where distance is easily tracked. It can be pretty difficult to get reliable measured distances on outside routes, unless you have a heart rate monitor watch that includes GPS tracking or a foot pod to measure distance.

At the start of a running program I tend to run intervals at a pretty conservative pace, say 80-85% MHR. Then build-up to faster intervals as the program progresses over the weeks approaching a target race, at which point they would be at 90-95% MHR. I try to perform each interval at the same speed, but will reduce speed of the later intervals if necessary to maintain control. Sometimes, I may not increase the intensity, but instead increase the number of intervals in a given session. I’m usually flexible to inject variety, but try to adjust my program to fit a particular goal. I’ll try to cover more about this in a future article.

The interval recovery jog is just as important as the sprint interval. To develop your fitness, you do not want to fully recover from the sprint interval before starting the next one. However you need to recover enough that you can perform another fast, high quality interval. A rough guide is to take as much time to recover that it takes to run the sprint intervals. Another option is to use your heart rate monitor to determine when to start the next sprint. For example, start the next sprint interval as soon as your heart rate drops below 65% of your maximum heart rate. The latter method has the advantage of preventing you from being able to run too fast in the sprint intervals.

Due to the intensity of a good interval training session, I would generally run only one such session per week.  My other hard day would likely be a tempo run, rather than another interval session.

You can follow my progress and see examples of how I structure my interval training in the Running Diary section of my blog.

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