The Running Thread --2025

[Naomeri]

ATTQOTD: I don’t know whether speed work helps on race day, but it certainly helps break up the monotony of training. If you’re doing all your training runs at the same pace, it gets boring.

 

[pluto377]

ATTQOTD: Absolutely I think speed work is necessary, as long as you have already done a base building phase to your training. I'm slower than a sloth and do run/walk, but I still do a day of formal speed work. It feels good to go a bit fast and as Naomeri said, it breaks up the training. Personally, I like to alternate weeks between intervals and longer tempo runs.

 

[Stitch&Co.]

ATTQOTD: If nothing else, some speed work does give you the knowledge and experience that you CAN go faster. If you only train at easy pace, then when you're in a race and actually need to go faster how will you know if you can? Speed work gives you experience going faster and lets you know how your body reacts to the faster paces. It's no good to try going faster in a race if I have to slow down more to recover from it.

 

[WillRunForPizza]

ATTQOTD: I probably wouldn't recommend someone start speedwork in their first few months of running. You're less likely to get injured if you give your body a chance to adapt to running slowly before you start running fast. Plus, when you start out, you're probably running too fast in general, so you're sort of doing speedwork all the time. If you add actual speedwork on top of that, that's more injury/overtraining risk.

But after you've been running consistently for a while and you're comfortable with it? Sure. Speedwork is great. It will help you get faster - and you're allowed to want to get faster regardless of whether you're at the front or back of the pack.

 

[Herding_Cats]

ATTQOTD: I probably wouldn't recommend someone start speedwork in their first few months of running. You're less likely to get injured if you give your body a chance to adapt to running slowly before you start running fast. Plus, when you start out, you're probably running too fast in general, so you're sort of doing speedwork all the time. If you add actual speedwork on top of that, that's more injury/overtraining risk.

But after you've been running consistently for a while and you're comfortable with it? Sure. Speedwork is great. It will help you get faster - and you're allowed to want to get faster regardless of whether you're at the front or back of the pack.

These are my thoughts as well.