A Simple Progression Run

Another Bonus Post to end the week that contains National Global Running Day. Don’t get used to it. This is also my first training-specific post, so enjoy it.

What’s a Progression Run? That is a run where, instead of running at a steady pace the entire time, you progressively increase your speed at certain intervals during the run so you end up running faster at the end than when you started. Why do a Progression Run? Without going into physiological details, it will help your mind and body learn to run faster more comfortably.

Getting Started

You need some way of measuring your pace in real-time. Personally, I use a gps watch which I have set to mark a lap at each half mile. You could do this without a gps watch by running a known distance such as a track or neighborhood loop. In this case you need to run by the feel of the effort instead of by pace. But that’s ok.

The Plan

This is a really simple plan. Start running at a nice, slow, comfortable pace. The first lap could count as your warmup. When you finish your first lap, run a little faster for the next lap. It doesn’t really matter how much faster; even a 1-second-faster pace is “faster”. I like to make it at least 5-10 seconds faster to leave some wiggle room in case I lose concentration and accidentally slow down. When you finish the second lap, run a little faster than that for the next lap. Repeat. Repeat again. Run each lap a little faster than the previous lap. Leave room at the end for a final slow comfortable lap and then some cool-down walking. It’s important for a couple of reasons: 1) you need to cool down after a hard run – don’t just stop running! 2) Note how much faster your “slow comfortable” pace is at the end than it was at the beginning!

The reason I decided to post about Progression Runs today is because I did a Progression Run yesterday.

I used half-mile laps. I was running on flat local roads and sidewalks. Here are my lap paces, as an example:

9:16, 8:51, 8:45, 8:36, 8:30, 8:19, 8:10, 7:59, 7:25, 8:26 (then a half-lap walking at 15:53).

I haven’t done a Progression Run in a while, so my initial slow lap was a recalibration of sorts.  I started about 20 seconds slower than my marathon pace and my fastest lap was 5 seconds slower than my 5k pace.  For each successive lap, my pace increased by 25, 6, 9, 6, 11, 9, 11, and 34 seconds. Note how my ending slow comfortable pace was 50 seconds faster than my initial slow comfortable pace! Yet it really did feel just as slow and comfortable as my starting pace. That’s an example of one difference that being warmed up can make!

One final note of significance is my final mile averaging 7:42. This is significant because about ten years ago, my son wanted me to help him run a mile at a pace under 8:00 in order to earn a physical fitness award at school. He only had a few weeks to train. I was running regularly then, he was not. We did it (seven-fifty-something), but it was a very hard effort back then for me to run a mile at that speed. Now, I’m ten years OLDER, and I just ran the final mile of 4.5 at a pace faster than that. And it wasn’t a killer!

The moral of this story is that training works, even for geezers!

Now, get out there and try a Progression Run! Let me know how you did.

Until next time,
The Plant-Based Plodder