Tueday Track Sessions at New River Track
From 22 April 2008 Track Coach David Chalfen offers weekly sessions on Tuesday evenings from 7:00pm
David will be at the track from 7.00pm. The reps will start at 7.20pm prompt and runners are expected to do their own warm up to be ready for this. David can advise on warm up structure/duration. The sessions are mostly at 3k to 5k pace, occasionally at 1500m pace with some longer stints at about 10k pace. Expect to run between 6k and 8.5k of hard efforts, with a fairly short recovery, in the region of about 40 secs per 400m of effort.
This 3k/5k pace is applicable for most of the year for endurance distances from 800m/1500m to marathon - and it's what you do on the other 6 days per week season by season that adds to the event-specificity. "That's why I rarely use quicker than 3k pace - that can be done at a different session when appropriate", says David.
David plans to split the group into two with about 36 minutes 10k level being about the cut off point - this is to ensure that the less speedy group get a short recovery rather than veering towards zero recovery if they are working to the timetable of the front of the first group. Slower than about 41 minutes for 10k it's hard to accommodate a meaningful session as this then requires a 3rd sub-group which is too much for 1 coach to manage. Sometimes sessions are done by time rather than distance so everyone can run as one group eg 6 x 4 mins at 5k pace, 90 sec jog/regroup.
The only planned break will be in October when he plans to do 3 weeks of Oregon circuits at the track - though for those targeting autumn marathons he's happy to suggest a running session for them.
Runners are encouraged to run the reps at even pace and David will sometimes task runners with a last lap pick up to guard against the trend of slowing down during each rep. Runners are also discouraged from opting in and out of reps to maintain a higher speed, partly as this is unhelpful to those who are doing the full session and partly because it just makes it a different session for them compared to what it's meant to be.
The reps are usually done in 35 to 40 minutes followed by a warm down either at the track, or by jogging home or to the tube.
David strongly advises against coming to the Tuesday session if you have raced further than about 10k on the Sunday (i.e. two days before) as this will just delay recovery and increase injury/illness risk. In such cases, and subject to individual plans etc., it is advised to wait until Thursday or Friday and do the session elsewhere.