Why You Need Speed Work: Track Training For Marathon Success
WHY MARATHON RUNNERS STILL NEED SPEED WORK
The question comes up on the track almost every session. Why am I running 800s, 400s and 200s when marathon pace is nowhere near this fast? It looks like the wrong tool for the job. It isn’t.
Speed work is not there to teach you your marathon pace. It is there to build the engine underneath it. Every rep at 3k or 1k effort raises your ceiling, and when your ceiling goes up, marathon pace stops feeling like a stretch and starts feeling comfortable. That is the whole point. You want to arrive on the start line with marathon pace sitting well inside your range, not right at the edge of it.
There is a second benefit that most runners underrate, and that is leg turnover. Marathon training is full of long, steady kilometres, and if that is all you ever do, your legs forget how to move quickly. Short reps keep the mechanics sharp and the cadence honest. One of the athletes in this session ran 3:24 in his first marathon off six weeks of marathon specific work. He is chasing sub 3 in Chicago now, and this is the work that gets him there.
WHAT A TRACK SPEED SESSION ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
This session was 3 × 800m, then 6 × 400m, then 6 × 200m. It progresses. You get faster as the workout goes on, not slower. The 800s sit at 3k rep pace, the 400s drop to 1k rep pace, and the 200s are flat out at the end when the legs are already tired.
The word that matters here is controlled. Every rep has a target pace and your job is to hit it. Not faster, not slower. Running the first 800 five seconds quick feels good for about ninety seconds and then wrecks the rest of the session. Speed work done properly is a discipline exercise as much as a fitness one. You are teaching your body to produce a specific effort on demand, which is exactly the skill you need at 32km in a marathon.
Set the workout up in your watch before you start. Hit the lap button on every rep and every recovery. If you are guessing at your splits mid session, you are not training. You are just running hard and hoping.
HOW OFTEN TO RUN INTERVALS IN MARATHON TRAINING
You do not need this session every week. Once a fortnight is enough for a long interval session while you are building for a marathon, and that is the frequency that keeps the quality high without digging a hole you cannot climb out of.
The bigger point is the type of interval. For marathon training, longer reps do most of the work. Think 2k reps, 3k reps, 1.5k reps and 1k reps. Those distances sit much closer to marathon pace, so the adaptation transfers directly to race day. That is where the bulk of your interval training should live.
The short stuff still has a place, just a smaller one. Drop in 400s and 200s roughly once every three to four weeks to pick up a bit of VO2 and keep the top end sharp. Any more often than that and you are spending energy on a system the marathon barely uses, at the cost of the sessions that actually matter. The athletes in this session were a week and a half out from Sydney. Short, sharp reps at that point are about turnover, not building fitness.
HOW TO WORK OUT YOUR TRAINING PACES
None of this works if you are guessing at your paces. Here is the fastest way to sort it out.
Go and run 1km all out. Properly all out. That gives you your 1k rep pace, and from there you can estimate the rest with a simple rule of thumb. Add roughly 15 seconds per kilometre for each step up in distance. If your 1k is 4:00 per km, your 3k rep pace sits around 4:15 and your 5k rep pace around 4:30. It is not exact science, but it gets you training in the right zone today instead of arguing about it for another month.
The accurate method is a 10km all out effort to establish your threshold pace. Put that number into your coaching platform and every workout from then on is calculated off your threshold, so each session lands in the zone it was designed for. That is the difference between running hard and training properly. Get your paces right, control your efforts, and the marathon looks after itself.
Speed work only pays off when it is built around the paces you actually have rather than the ones you hope for. Personalised coaching sets your track sessions off your real threshold and adjusts them every six weeks as your fitness moves, and you can book a free video call to talk through what your speed work should look like right now.