Thursday Session 20/4 – 400s

19 April 2017 - By David Jobling

Our session this Thursday is 400m repetitions….with reducing recoveries.

A session for all, maybe not our gladiators running in Sunday’s London Marathon, please let’s meet Witham Leisure Centre at 1930 to get away by 1945 and head towards the 400m loop we use regularly at Eastways where we can join any headed straight there.

The session structure is one we have used before but with a bit extra recovery, so after warm up and drills we’ll get into small groups and kick off together with 4 x 400m with reducing recoveries of 60 seconds, 45 seconds and 30 seconds between each 400 and then a 2 minute recovery after the last of the 4 before doing the block of 4 all over again, another twice. So we’ll run 12x 400s max or as much or as many as we can in 30 minutes.

Please bring a stopwatch or timer with you if you can to help you and perhaps others with the session, or even have a go programming it into your Garmin or other device.

Pacing, ideally, should be under equivalent 5k race pace time for 400m. If you don’t know what your 5k time is or might be, don’t worry just pace yourself a bit quicker than your normal Tuesday group pace or at “sub chatter pace”.

Recoveries will be standing/moving around.

Intervals of this distance/duration/recovery mean we’ll be working on the lactate energy system. So, to remind ourselves or if you’re new to this – after rifling through coaching articles and notes, here’s the why and how:

• hardworking muscles produce lactic acid
• running comfortably our bodies have the ability to flush this away
• working harder there’s a point where it can’t be done quickly enough
• lactic acid builds up leaving burning muscles and a desire to stop
• intervals push us above this, we learn to process lactic acid faster
• muscles become more efficient
• recovery intervals help us keep repeating

I’ll bring some copies of a one pager article I have on this if anyone would like a copy, and some pace charts.

Technical points to think about will be on hands/arms and that zipline, knee up/toe up and upright posture.

We’ll have somewhere to place drinks or any items you may wish to discard before or put on after the session to keep warm.

Alex and I look forward to meeting up with everyone Thursday. DJ