How to run and ride faster - Part 1
Running or cycling faster starts with identifying the specific performance you want to improve and understanding where you currently are. Easier sessions help you accumulate aerobic volume and manage fatigue, while harder sessions provide exposure to the speeds, power outputs and intensities you need to develop. This article explains how runners and cyclists can use pace, power, heart rate and RPE together to guide training intensity and make key sessions more specific to their goals.
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TRAINING BREAKDOWN
"Underpinning it all is this question: What are you actually trying to get faster at?
By Emma O'Toole
Hi there,
I recently ran a poll inside my free coaching community asking runners and cyclists what they wanted the most help with, and running and riding faster came out on top, which gives us plenty to talk about!!
So I thought I’d turn it into a little three-part series looking at some of the things that can help you do exactly that, and I want to start with something that sounds incredibly obvious:
If you want to run or ride faster, you need to spend some time actually running or riding faster.
I know, groundbreaking! But one of the things I often see with runners and cyclists is that they do their “easy” sessions too hard, and then they aren’t able to work hard enough when the session actually calls for it, often because they don’t have the legs to hit the pace, power or intensity we’re looking for.
And the result is that they can end up spending a lot of their training somewhere in the middle, which can make it harder to progress.
Now a lot of endurance training should feel relatively comfortable. Those easier miles allow you to accumulate training volume, develop your aerobic fitness and manage fatigue so you can keep training consistently.
Then we have the sessions where it does need to be uncomfortable, where we need to get more specific.
Those harder sessions give you the opportunity to spend time at the speeds, power outputs and intensities you need to improve. How we do that, and how hard you need to work, depends on what you’re training for and where you currently are.
Underpinning it all is this question: What are you actually trying to get faster at?
“I want to get faster” can mean a lot of things.
A runner wanting to break 20 mins at parkrun has different demands from someone aiming to run a sub 4 hour marathon.
Likewise, a cyclist wanting to improve their 10 mile TT time has a different goal from someone wanting to hold a faster average speed over a 200km audax.
This is why copying a hard workout you saw someone else complete on Strava doesn’t automatically make it a good workout for you. The session needs a purpose and needs to match your current endurance athlete profile.
A good example here is 400m repeats. Depending on the pace, recovery and runner, these can be used in lots of different ways.
Imagine one runner completes each 400m in 75 seconds and another takes 2 minutes. Give them both 12 x 400m and one accumulates 15 minutes of work, while the other accumulates 24 minutes.
On paper, they’ve completed exactly the same session, but the time they’ve spent working, the intensity they can sustain and the overall demand of the session can be very different.
This is why I don't programme a session based purely on the distance of the reps. I want to know what adaptation we're trying to achieve and who I'm actually programming it for.
Next up, determining how hard a session should be.
If you’re not using some form of metric to gauge how hard to work, you’re leaving a lot of low-hanging fruit on the table. I find the best approach is to use a combination of objective and subjective metrics here.
This all begins with some sort of baseline assessment so you know where you’re currently at. For example, you could use a threshold setter workout to give you some numbers to work from, like the one you can grab for free here.
Pace and power give us very useful numbers to work with, but I also want you to understand what different intensities actually feel like.
RPE is incredibly useful here because your watch doesn’t know that you slept terribly last night, you’ve had a stressful day at work or your legs are still carrying fatigue from another session. All of those things can significantly change how a particular pace or power feels on the day.
We can also use heart rate. A lot of runners feel they need to hit X pace for a run, or cyclists X average speed for a ride. What can happen is that you end up chasing those numbers and working harder than needed to hit the target, which then adds fatigue that you carry into the rest of your training week.
Take this easy session from one of the cyclists I coach:
The power (pink line) is relatively steady, but their heart rate (red line) was much higher than we’d normally expect for the power they were producing.
For an easier session, that matters. The aim was to keep the intensity down and manage fatigue, but their heart rate was telling us they were working harder than planned.
If we’d looked at power alone, we would have missed that.
Heart rate gives us another useful piece of information and brings us back to the purpose of the session. What adaptation am I looking for here? What do I actually want from this session?
Once you understand what the session is trying to achieve, then you can use a combination of pace, power, heart rate and RPE to execute it.
For example, your pace or power targets for shorter Vo2 max intervals are going to look very different from a longer threshold session. But if you don’t know what those pace, power, heart rate or RPE targets are, you are training blind.
Understanding what you’re trying to improve and where you currently are is the crux of running and riding faster. From there, you can choose your harder sessions accordingly, then give yourself the opportunity to do them and consolidate them.
Have a look at your training this week and ask yourself:
Are you overcooking the easier sessions in your week?
When your key workout comes around, have you set pace, power, heart rate or RPE targets for the session, and what are you using to monitor it?
Do you know what you’re trying to achieve each session?
If most of your training is ending up somewhere in the middle of not quite easy enough and not quite hard enough, having a concrete plan for your key sessions is fundamental. If you’ve gone hard enough in your hard session, you should want an easier day the next day!
And if you’re wondering what some of these workouts look like, I’ve added example sessions inside my free coaching community, (click here to join). There are running workouts for distances from 5k through to the marathon, plus cycling sessions to improve your FTP and 5 min power.
Have a look through, choose one that matches what you're currently working towards and get in touch and let me know how you get on!
Happy running and riding!
Emma x
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