A few weeks ago, I started working on several articles that dealt with how training pace/effort impacts training outcome. These were focused on combatting our tendencies to run too slow on faster runs and too fast on slower runs. As I was doing research and thinking through how I wanted to approach the subject, I realized that most runners – unless you belong to a team or club, or run at the elite level – don’t have much of an accurate reference point for their training.
I’m talking, of course, about building a running baseline from which you can derive how fast a specific run should be for your skill level. Most workouts are not prescribed just for distance, but place an emphasis on the relative speed. For example, in the first Workout Wednesdays I posted the pace was 30 seconds faster than 5K pace. But this raises an immediate problem if you don’t know what your specific 5K pace is.
Another issue is how can you track progress accurately if you don’t really know where you started? Of course you might start to notice that your times for certain distances start to drop and efforts become easier, but this is hardly an accurate, quantifiable way to track improvements.
It’s important to create and maintain a standardized baseline for your training. You want to get a sense of your max effort across multiple distances, which will help you build a picture of your aerobic and anaerobic fitness and, subsequently, help you tailor your training to meet your specific goals.
This doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. Personally, I try to run time trials for my 1 mile, 5K, and 5 mile distances every 2-3 months. This helps me to be able to see where I am improving, where I am stagnating, and where I am declining in performance. Time trials are even more important after a period of drastic change in your training. After I had Covid-19 in January I found that my mile was about 30 seconds slower and my 5K was about a minute and a half slower than the last time I trialed those distances in November.
Building a baseline, or conducting a time trial, doesn’t have to be much of a deviation from your regular training. I usually run my tempo runs on Monday, so I try to do my 5K and 5 mile time trials on those days. Wednesdays are my speed workout days, so that is when I try to slip a race-pace mile in. The key is, essentially, not losing sight of where you are at physically so that you can maximize effort on every run. How can you run at a target pace derived from a given pace if you aren’t sure what that given pace is?
As a side note, another way to combat this is to do all your training based on heartrate zones. This is an easy way to train a little bit more accurately if you don’t already have a baseline. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, most workouts are prescribed based on pace and not heartrate (though there is an emerging body of literature that argues for heartrate-based training over pace-based training).
At the end of the day, it certainly behooves the runner to know where they stand at several common distances. For those who lean more towards heartrate-based training it at least helps to be able to track progress. Do you have an established baseline? If so, how often and what distances do you track? If not, how do you see yourself implementing time trialing into your current training plan?
If you liked this article, check out: What Happens When You Don’t Run.
Great advice Ski!
Hey Matt, this was a super helpful article! Thank you for providing helpful hints to establishing a baseline. This is something I don’t do near enough unless I’m training for a specific race so it was beneficial to hear about the advantages of doing it on a consistent basis.