4 x 1200m, 3 Mile Run, 6 x 300m

Designed for 5K runners

Intensity

1200s cutdowns: starting at 10K pace and quickening to 1500m pace
3 Mile Run @ “easy” tempo
300s cutdowns: starting at 3K pace and quickening to “final” kick speed

Recovery

400m after each rep and between blocks of work

Exertion

8/10

Periodization

Performance Period

Context & Details

This was one of the final workouts Prefontaine performed before his storied 4th place finish at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games in the 5,000m.

It’s taken from the brilliant book, Winning Running, by his coach, Bill Dellinger. In the book, Dellinger outlines Pre’s entire 1972 training schedule. Reading through it, you see why Prefontaine ran so fast, so often — he practiced running fast year round.

This workout is a great example of the iconic “hard/easy” approach to training. The 1200s are hard. The middle segment 3 Mile run is easy. And the final activity, 6 x 300m is hard.

However, the hard/easy approach seems to be somewhat misunderstood. Far too many think it applies to daily efforts — an easy day of training follows a hard day of training. I see how one could think that, but it’s a shallow interpretation — and cause for much confusion. A more correct, but still inaccurate, interpretation is applying it within a session — a hard segment of activity followed by an easy segment of activity (like in today’s WOTD), or on a session-by-session basis.

The real “hard”/”easy” principle is this:

Train to make what was once hard, easy.

As discussed in a prior WOTD, for runners, advancement of training density should be a top priority throughout their training. As runners get in better condition they can run faster, longer and need less recovery to do. This is true at every level, between reps and sets in a workout, and the time between training stimuli. And abides by the “hard”/”easy” principle.

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According to Dellinger’s schedules, Pre would often perform an “easy” training in the morning (for him in 1972, that was typically between 6:00 - 5:20/mile tempo) and follow up the same day with a “hard” training session. This “hard”/”easy” pattern would happen 2 to 4 days in a row before a day of 2 light runs (read jogging for 20-30 minutes on grass).

Here’s a page from May 1972, the week Pre won the Pac 8 5K championships.

Notice Pre ran fast and hard 4 days in a row before winning Pac 8s with the “hard”/”easy” principle being applied on much more dense horizons (session-by-session) than is common. With 4 consecutive days of fast running, I would argue these training sessions were not “hard” for Pre at this point, in fact they were “easy.” There was only one “hard” activity that week — the Pac 8 race.

It all comes back to the first principles of intelligent training for competitive racing, which Dellinger was clearly aware.

Races are fast — and they’re played with no timeouts. So it’s wise to prioritize in practice running fast with as little interruption as possible.

Since there is a neurological component (speed) running fast needs to be practice frequently to refine motor learning and skill acquisition.

But varying degrees of fast running comes with varying metabolic consequences — the faster running is relative to a runner’s maximum capacity, the higher the metabolic tax and longer period of rest afterwards.

Thankfully speed exists on a spectrum of difficulty — so the trick is finding the sweet spot or pace — that runners can practice a lot, but does not exhaust them.

The more frequently just enough stress is applied by just fast enough running, the higher tolerance gained from adaption, and the fitter and more antifragile runners become.

Runners can measure their progress by clear and simple means of how prepared they are to run at competitive speeds for their target race distance in a tireless (Aerobic) state — or how easy running hard has become.

Any questions? Direct Message me on twitter.
Thx. | jm

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3 Good Books on 5,000m and Road Race training

The Science of Running by Steve Magness
The Five and Ten Men by Richard Amery
Faster Road Racing by Pete Pfitzinger