Avoid Late-Race Blowups With These 5 Workouts

As you get to the back half of your race, the reality of the effort starts to set in.

Your stride—once smooth and crisp—now feels lethargic, each step requiring more effort than the last. The wooden, deadened feeling begins in your legs and starts to creep throughout your body. You see your pace slowing as your goal time slips away.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Lacking the endurance to hit your goal times is a common problem, and it’s not limited to longer races like the marathon and half marathon.

Because what is a distance race if not a test of the extension of your endurance?

You could likely go out right now and run a mile at your goal marathon, half marathon, or even 5K and 10K pace with no problem. The difficulty is in developing the ability to hold that pace throughout the race distance.

This is a lesson the godfather of distance running, Arthur Lydiard, has been trying to beat into our collective heads since the early 1960s. But it’s a lesson most common training sessions don’t do a good job of teaching us.

In order to build race-functional fitness and have the endurance to race well, we need training that challenges both our brains and our bodies in ways that mimic race situations.

This goes beyond simply improving your lactate threshold or VO2 max. It’s a mix of physical and mental exposure to race stress in a way that prepares you to translate your fitness into race results. In other words, training that teaches to the test of the race.

The Hard Truth of Endurance and Fatigue

When it comes to distance races, what we experience as fatigue isn’t as simple as it appears.

Often, we think of fatigue as either a depletion of something (fuel) or an accumulation of something (waste), but we now have a better understanding that our brains begin to regulate and shut down our efforts long before either of these truly becomes the physical limiting factor.

What Tim Noakes, MD, called the Central Governor Theory says that the brain is what controls our effort in a race. Our brain’s primary interest is keeping us safe. When it experiences something it perceives as a threat, our brain’s reaction is to slow us down to limit the danger.

So when we look at trying to extend endurance in a race, it’s not just a matter of improving fitness, but also about improving your ability to actually use the fitness that you already have. Exposing your brain to race-like conditions is a key part of training your brain not to view those situations as threats on race day.

This is especially important because of another, more grounded truth of distance races: maintaining pace throughout a race takes increasing effort as the race goes on.

To recap: not only do we need to build enough fitness to hold race pace and train our brains not to shut us down prematurely, but we also need to train both our bodies and our brains to work harder as they get fatigued.

That’s a tall order for a single workout, but there are ways we can accomplish each of those things in a single training session.

The Recipe for Endurance Running Success

When you’re programming a workout to help you extend your race endurance, there are a few characteristics that are essential, no matter what your goal race distance is:

1. The workout needs to be long enough to make your brain start to feel the “threat” of fatigue in a way that’s similar to race day.
2. It needs to be at a pace close enough to goal pace that it translates to race day
3. It needs to end harder (usually faster) than it starts

Let’s examine a common workout of cruise mile repeats within this framework.

Classically, this workout would be four to five reps of one mile at slightly faster than your half marathon pace, with one to two minutes recovery between each rep.

It’s a great workout for improving your lactate threshold, which is an important factor to train for any distance runner. But it’s not a particularly “race-functional” workout.

The reps only being one mile long means that each rep doesn’t feel particularly challenging mentally or physically. The rest at the end of each rep means your mind resets to feeling “safe,” avoiding exposure to the feelings of threat that will occur in the race. And because the pace is generally steady throughout, there is little chance to practice running harder as you get tired (because, again, in a race, maintaining pace takes increasing effort).

While this workout does an excellent job of improving your fitness (and should be included in any training program in my opinion), it’s doing very little to put you in a position to express that fitness on race day.

Instead, let’s look at what a race-functional workout would look like for specific race distances and how they mimic what you’ll be facing on race day.

5K/10K Race-Functional Workouts for Improving Running Endurance

Because 5K and 10K races are shorter, it’s possible for your workouts to be close to, or even equal to, the race distance. This is a great way to make sure that your brain feels a similar threat to what you’ll experience on race day.

However, we want to make sure that your brain doesn’t feel so threatened that it begins to shut things down. So the workout can’t simply be run hard for the full race distance. Instead, we can control the effort with a “progressive tempo run.”

Like the name implies, it’s a tempo run—of sorts—that will gradually get faster throughout. This lets you practice running faster while you’re fatigued, teaches muscle fibers to fire when tired, and teaches your brain not to view this late-stage fatigue as a threat that it needs to counter by slowing down.

Example for 5K Training:

3-mile continuous run

Mile 1: Roughly 30 sec slower than goal 5K pace

Mile 2: Roughly 15 sec slower than goal 5K pace

Mile 3: Roughly goal 5K pace

Example for 10K Training:

5-mile continuous run

Miles 1-2: Roughly 20 sec slower than goal 10K pace

Mile 3: Roughly 10 sec slower than goal 10K pace

Mile 4: Roughly goal 10K pace

Mile 5: Roughly 10 sec faster than goal 10K pace

Making this a continuous run and taking out rest breaks means that the fatigue and the threat sensation build up similarly to how they will on race day. But it’s still in a controlled enough environment that you can practice overcoming that response and building the habit to overcome it in future races.

Despite “tempo run” being in the name, this should not be a true replacement for tempo runs or other lactate threshold workouts, but rather a more race-functional supplement to your training as a whole. I don’t recommend running this type of workout any more frequently than every two to three weeks, and would allow at least 10 days after a workout like this before racing.

Half Marathon and Marathon Race-Functional Workouts for Improving Running Endurance

The length of half marathon and marathon races means designing a workout of a similar length to the race distance isn’t as feasible. It also makes it more difficult to simulate the kind of fatigue that you’ll face late in the race.

Still, we can accomplish this in a workout setting by focusing on longer repeats and higher total volume. It’s also helpful to include faster running in select long runs to use the natural fatigue of a long run to our advantage.

Half Marathon Workout

3 x 2 miles, first two reps at goal pace, last rep at 10 sec under goal pace, with .25 mile jog recovery between reps.

Marathon Workout

4 miles at goal pace, .25 mile jog, 3 miles @ 20 sec under goal pace.

These workouts both keep the pace close enough to goal pace to translate well to the race day experience, and also speed up the pace as the workout goes on. That artificial increase of effort will help mimic what you’ll need to do on race day to maintain pace throughout the race.

Likewise, the higher total volume and longer reps make this more of a race-functional workout than something like cruise repeats by more closely matching the experience you’ll be facing on race day.

As with the 5K/10K workout examples, these workouts should be used sparingly and considered a supplement that allows you to better use the fitness that you’re building in your other workouts.

Long Run Example

Half marathon: 

14-16 miles, with the first 10-12 at normal long run pace and the final 4 miles at goal half marathon pace.

Marathon:

16-18 miles, with the first 10 at normal long run pace and the final 6-8 miles at goal marathon pace.

Here we’re using the initial miles of the long run to accumulate fatigue and make the final goal pace miles feel more like how goal pace will feel at the end of the race. That practice at increasing effort late in the run is also more likely to feel “threatening” than the same amount of miles at goal pace would if you ran them fresh.

Similar to the other workouts discussed, this is not something that should be used to replace other long runs in your training. Including this type of long run two to three times over the course of the training cycle, spread out by three to four weeks, and gradually building up both the total distance and the distance spent at goal pace, will give you your best results on race day.

Practice Makes “Safe,” But Not Easy

By adding this race-functional work into your training, you’ll be better able to handle the mental and physical demands of race day. As you mentally prepare in the days before the race, think back to your experiences in training and how they’ll relate to what you’ll need to do on the course.

Also remember that even with proper training, the race is likely to still feel hard. The truth is that racing is hard, but that hard doesn’t mean “danger,” or that anything is wrong. Working through that and preparing both your body and mind for the experience will make sure you’re ready to show off your fitness and new extension of endurance at your next race.