Workout of the Day: 1,000m Breakdowns
1,000m Breakdowns
Intensity — 3,000m to 400m pace
Recovery — 3 minutes after 1Ks. Walk/jog distance of next breakdown rep
Exertion — 9/10
Context & Details
This is a classic breakdown session which I learned about and stole from Vin Lananna.
It’s called 1,000m breakdowns because the athlete runs 1-2 x 1,000m at 3K pace then runs a 1,000m broken down into individual reps of 500m, 300m, 200m. Then they repeat this pattern for as long as appropriate throughout the workout.
My go-to construction for the 3K/5K runner is as follows:
2 x 1K
1 x 500m, 300m, 200m
1 x 1K
2 x 500m, 300m, 200m
That’s 6,000m of high quality work. You can apply any combination. Less experienced athletes respond well to about 3,000m-4,000m of volume, more experienced can handle up to 8,000m of work.
The 1K reps are ran at 3,000m race speed and the 500m, 300m, 200m “breakdown” of the 1,000m distance are performed at 1500m, 800m, 400m speeds, respectively. For recovery the athlete walks/jogs the distance of the next rep in the breakdown. I usually allow for 1:1 work:rest ratio after each full 1,000m rep, or about 3-4 minutes.
Typically, I schedule this type of session once every 3 weeks starting roughly 9 weeks out from a target 3,000m or 5,000m race. First, I look to establish the target speeds over a single 1K rep and 1-2 sets of the 500m, 300m, 200m breakdown, for no more than 3,000m of total volume. Then as the athlete’s fitness improvement allows, I shorten the recovery time between reps upon future revisits of the session. Only if the athlete is demonstrating exponential fitness gains do I increase the volume, first by adding another 1K to the opening set and then to the middle and finally closing phases of the session, but never going beyond 8,000m in total volume.
If you want to learn more about this session, I go into much deeper detail about it here, examining a specific session of an athlete I coached, in the (soon to be Members Only access) High Performance Workouts section.