Workout of the Day: 5 x 5,000m
5 x 5,000m
Intensity — 98% of Goal Marathon Speed
Recovery — 1,000m @ 88% of Goal Marathon Speed
Exertion — 8/10
Context & Details
To paraphrase Renato Canova: In the Marathon, there is no such thing as The Wall. The Wall only happens when there was not good training.
He’s right.
Athletes hit The Wall in any distance from 400m, 800m, mile, etc. up to the marathon and beyond when their training was not effective for the demands of their event.
The Wall became a popular myth because many coaches and runners didn’t want to accept the truth that their training methods were subpar.
There are a lot of variables to address when conditioning a runner to run a successful marathon. In this post I’m going to focus on what Canova calls “aerobic lipid power.”
Lipid, like glycogen, is a fuel source for our bodies. However, breaking down fatty acids into fuel is a clunky biological process that needs to be trained to become efficient. Humans, even very lean marathon runners, have an abundant supply of fatty acids to fuel muscle action. And we have a short supply of glycogen. Glycogen is the go-to fuel of the brain and there are innate protective mechanisms in place which will cut of glycogen supply to working muscles if the brain senses its stores being depleted. When this happens, you “bonk” or hit The Wall.
However, there is a workaround — use fatty acids (lipids) as your primary fuel source. But this takes a lot of conditioning to make happen, especially at racing speeds.
Fueling substrates for endurance activities are a mixture of glycogen, fatty acids, pyruvate, lactate, and more. Essentially, what your training does is influence the proportion of each of those ingredients in the fueling mixture your body uses to make sustained running locomotion possible.
Frequent and prolonged exposure of running in the Fat Max, or Zone 2, range will influence a propensity for the body to apply fatty acids and lactate in increased amounts in your body’s fueling mix which results in a preservation of glycogen.
This is a very brief and incomplete overview of the mechanisms at play, but hopefully orients you somewhat about fueling substrates and their importance to endurance running performance.
5 x 5,000m at 98% of Goal Marathon Speed (GMS) with 1,000m “float” at 88% of GMS is a Canova-style workout. In fact, all the Marathon WOTDs to date have been Canova workouts.
This particular workout falls in Canova’s Specific Period of preparation when training becomes “mathematic” in his view. At this point in a runner’s training they’re prepared to run the pace as prescribed for the first 4 segments, but the final segment they may not be able to hit the pace, they may slow down. And that’s the point, as this is where the real training stimulus is had. The final 6K of work exists in a condition where available glycogen stores are low to none and the demand to keep running in a glycogen-depleted state teaches the body to use more Fatty Acids as fuel.
Along with educating the body biologically to reconfigure its internal fuel mixture, this workout enhances aerobic (lipid) power, resistance to fatigue, running economy, and lactate threshold velocity. As mentioned earlier, it’s done in the final period of training which is roughly the last 10-12 weeks before the target marathon. A runner would do this once, maybe twice in that period, 3-4 weeks apart. And would take anywhere from 2-5 days of easy regeneration jogging afterwards to recover from the session.
Remember, good training is about teaching, which means dealing with failure. Good training is not necessarily about the successful completion of the assignment. That is saved for race day.