Tempo Run Guide

What is a Tempo Run and How Do I Do It? - This is an excellent guide from Runner's World that explains Tempo Runs and everything you need to know about them! Read this to understand what a tempo run is if you're a beginner. Here is an excerpt from the article that explains what a Tempo Run is:

"A true tempo run – a threshold run – is at a pace that’s about 25-30 seconds per mile slower than your 5K race pace, says running coach Jack Daniels, who popularised the tempo run in his book Daniels’ Running Formula.

Threshold pace is the hardest effort at which your body is able to clear as much lactate as it is producing while working comfortably hard.

That’s the key difference between a race effort and a tempo run. In an all-out speed session, your body passes this limit – in other words, your body produces more lactate than you can process – and so fatigue develops rapidly. A threshold pace, on the other hand, can be held steadily (albeit not too comfortably) for at least 20 minutes or up to one hour, in a race lasting that long. For those fond of using heart rate monitors, Daniels notes that tempo runs should be done at 86-90% of your maximum heart rate and feel ‘comfortably hard’.

Read the rest of the article for full information on the benefits of doing Tempo runs as well as for ideas of different types of Tempo workouts you can do.

We usually do a tempo once a week at Horseshoe Lake on the bike path or some of us are doing a long interval workout instead. The length of the bike path is 1.6 miles, so it allows us to set up our water and rehydrate as we pass on each lap. Some of us run together, and some go our own pace but we're all together showing up to get through a tough workout!

You can set up any kind of workout on your smartwatch! You can use these guides to set up any kind of run ahead of time from interval workouts on the track to longer types of tempo workouts. Your watch will then create the splits for you automatically during the workout. You can always set your watch up to allow you to just manually press the lap button as well. However, setting it up ahead of time takes the thinking/guesswork out of a tough run when sometimes the last thing you want to be thinking about is manually entering your splits!

Here is a video on how to do this for a Garmin

Here is how to set up a custom workout on an Apple watch

There are also other programs you can use, such as Runna, to generate suggested workouts for you that are then sent directly to your watch automatically! Many of us use Runna to help us train and to come up with more complicated, custom workouts for each of us individually.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse