Step 1: Start racing.
Step 2: Finish the race.
Step 3: Just kidding. Keep running, slacker.
All joking aside, I had my first race of the spring season this past weekend. I went down to Louisville and ran the Anthem 5k, finishing 4th in 15:24. Not the greatest time ever, but off of a winter of base training that's about where I expected to be. Plus, I came home with $125, so that made the trip worth it.
After the race, as you may guess, I did a workout: I changed out of my uniform and ran a 20-minute tempo, averaging about 5:15 pace for the post-race session. I got some weird looks from people who were still in or just finishing the race, especially since I stayed near the course so I could get mile splits.
Of course, I'm not the only person doing this. The elites have been doing post-race workouts for a while now; Galen Rupp and the Nike Oregon Project recently received a lot of attention for the workout completed after he set the American 2-mile indoor record this year. Even at the Anthem 5k this weekend, I noticed a couple other top guys running hard instead of cooling down.
So what's the benefit?
There's a lot of interesting science and reason behind it, which is better explained by Running Times than by me. Essentially, though, my logic was this:
In me typical weekly schedule, I've been doing three hard days per week: one hill day, one longer sub-threshold run, and one long run. In between those days I'm mostly doing recovery mileage. With the race on Saturday, I was forced to adjust my schedule, adding easy days before and after the race, for rest and recovery. Effectively, I missed out on my sub-threshold and long run workouts, replacing them instead with a very short 5k race. I added a little intensity, but lost a lot of volume.
The post-race workout serves the purpose of adding some quality volume back into my schedule. After all, I'm training for a half marathon; a 5k is so short that it won't improve my half marathon fitness very much. But if I can add in some volume after the race, and get in close to 7 miles of quality work instead of only 3, then I'm giving my body a much greater stimulus for half marathon fitness. And I'm going to have to take recovery days after the race anyway, so why not maximize the amount of work I'm getting in?
It's all about getting more bang for your buck on race day. Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy; since a 5k isn't all that hard (well, it is, just not very far), a tempo run afterward makes harder...and also more race-specific, which is the goal of training.
And here's the weird thing: I actually felt better during the post-race tempo than during the race itself. That's probably because tempo pace is closer to what I've been training so far, so it's more inside my comfort zone, but still...it was a nice feeling, to improve the long I ran.
I have another tune-up 5k in about 10 days, the Bockfest 5k, and I plan on doing another 20-minute tempo after that one, as well. Here's hoping for big improvements.
Step 2: Finish the race.
Step 3: Just kidding. Keep running, slacker.
All joking aside, I had my first race of the spring season this past weekend. I went down to Louisville and ran the Anthem 5k, finishing 4th in 15:24. Not the greatest time ever, but off of a winter of base training that's about where I expected to be. Plus, I came home with $125, so that made the trip worth it.
After the race, as you may guess, I did a workout: I changed out of my uniform and ran a 20-minute tempo, averaging about 5:15 pace for the post-race session. I got some weird looks from people who were still in or just finishing the race, especially since I stayed near the course so I could get mile splits.
Of course, I'm not the only person doing this. The elites have been doing post-race workouts for a while now; Galen Rupp and the Nike Oregon Project recently received a lot of attention for the workout completed after he set the American 2-mile indoor record this year. Even at the Anthem 5k this weekend, I noticed a couple other top guys running hard instead of cooling down.
So what's the benefit?
There's a lot of interesting science and reason behind it, which is better explained by Running Times than by me. Essentially, though, my logic was this:
In me typical weekly schedule, I've been doing three hard days per week: one hill day, one longer sub-threshold run, and one long run. In between those days I'm mostly doing recovery mileage. With the race on Saturday, I was forced to adjust my schedule, adding easy days before and after the race, for rest and recovery. Effectively, I missed out on my sub-threshold and long run workouts, replacing them instead with a very short 5k race. I added a little intensity, but lost a lot of volume.
The post-race workout serves the purpose of adding some quality volume back into my schedule. After all, I'm training for a half marathon; a 5k is so short that it won't improve my half marathon fitness very much. But if I can add in some volume after the race, and get in close to 7 miles of quality work instead of only 3, then I'm giving my body a much greater stimulus for half marathon fitness. And I'm going to have to take recovery days after the race anyway, so why not maximize the amount of work I'm getting in?
It's all about getting more bang for your buck on race day. Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy; since a 5k isn't all that hard (well, it is, just not very far), a tempo run afterward makes harder...and also more race-specific, which is the goal of training.
And here's the weird thing: I actually felt better during the post-race tempo than during the race itself. That's probably because tempo pace is closer to what I've been training so far, so it's more inside my comfort zone, but still...it was a nice feeling, to improve the long I ran.
I have another tune-up 5k in about 10 days, the Bockfest 5k, and I plan on doing another 20-minute tempo after that one, as well. Here's hoping for big improvements.
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