RUN your next PB
The Different Types of Running Training (And Why Most Runners Never Improve)
Most runners fall into one of three traps… They run everything at the same "comfortably hard" threshold pace, they skip building a base because it feels too easy, or they never touch specific threshold and top-end work at all. All three lead to the same place, years of training with nothing to show for it.
I had an experienced runner tell me that over 15 years of running half marathons, she'd never seen an improvement. Every session was run at the same pace. Each week she just added a few kilometres to her long run and squeezed in a couple of mid-distance runs during the week.
If you want to get faster, you need to do some faster running.
Understand the following types of running, and you understand almost everything behind smart training.
Easy / Recovery / Long Runs — The Base
Conversational pace. If you can't hold a full sentence, you're going too fast. Roughly 80% of your weekly running should sit here, keeping your heart rate under your max aerobic heart rate (180 minus your age is a good starting estimate).
This is where the boring, unsexy adaptations happen - capillaries, mitochondria, stroke volume. All the physiological machinery that decides how much work your body can do before it starts to struggle. Think of it as building a bigger engine. The bigger it is, the less effort race pace costs you.
Long runs live in this same easy zone, just extended. If you were running 10km most mornings during the week, your long run might stretch to 18–25km on the weekend. For a competent runner, 1.5–2 hours is a reasonable long run target. The extra time conditions your legs for distance and builds mental resilience for when things get hard later in a race.
This is the session everyone skips because it feels too easy to be useful. Ironically, it's the single biggest reason most people's splits fall apart late in a race… they never built the engine in the first place.
Threshold — The Race Pace Developer
Comfortably uncomfortable. It's the pace you could probably hold for around an hour if someone forced you to, where you're working but still in control.
Physiologically, threshold work raises the point where lactate starts accumulating faster than your body can clear it. In simple terms, it pushes your ceiling higher. When that ceiling moves, your race pace feels more sustainable because you're operating further from your limit. This is also why tempo running is so valuable for marathoners specifically. It's training your muscles to fatigue slower over long efforts.
This is where most runners go wrong, not the session itself, but how often they do it. Threshold becomes the default pace for every run. Not just planned sessions, but easy days, long runs, all of it drift toward this same mid-intensity effort. The problem is you can't recover from threshold the way you recover from easy running. Do it too often and the fatigue compounds, week after week, until you're getting slower rather than faster.
VO₂ Max — The Top End
Hard to very hard. The pace you can only hold for a few minutes before needing to recover.
But this isn't suffering for its own sake, it's about improving your body's maximum ability to take in, transport, and use oxygen. Think of it as increasing the size of the engine itself. If your maximum aerobic capacity grows, every pace below it becomes relatively easier.
In practice, this looks like interval training: short, hard bursts followed by longer periods of easy jogging to recover, then repeat. Quality matters more than just surviving the set, so these sessions are usually short with generous recovery.
These are powerful and effective, but only once you've built a solid aerobic base underneath them. Skip the base and you'll either never get fit enough to hit these paces properly, or you'll hit them once and be unable to repeat the effort.
Lactic Tolerance — The Pain Cave
Different from threshold. Threshold teaches your body to delay lactate build-up. Lactic tolerance teaches you what happens once you've already lost that battle.
Your legs burning, your breathing is heavy, everything is telling you to slow down. The goal isn't to avoid lactate, it's to keep producing good movement despite it.
Use these sessions sparingly. They're brutally taxing and hard to recover from. Build your whole program around them and you'll get very good at one thing, being tired.
Compromised Running — RUNNING on Dead Legs
This is running on legs that have already worked, off the sled, off burpees, off lunges, off a bike that just emptied you. It's essential for HYROX and triathlon, but it can teach runners something fresh legs never can.
Its job isn't to make you fitter. It's to teach your body how to run efficiently once fatigue has already set in. Nothing else prepares you for running well after your legs have been asked to produce force for an extended period.
AND The Sessions That Add Variety (Without Replacing the Above)…
Progression runs: Start at your natural easy pace and finish faster, gradually building speed as the run goes on. Harder than a base run, but not as intense as threshold or VO₂ max work. A good bridge session when you want more challenge without full intensity.
Fartlek runs: Swedish for "speed play." A loose, unstructured cousin of interval training: push to that next tree or street sign, recover, then push again to the next landmark. Less rigid, less intense, and a good way to keep training from feeling like a chore.
(I like these sessions when you want something effective but you just don’t have a structured session in you)
Sprints: Useful for every runner, not just sprinters. Sprinting builds muscular strength and power, which translates into more efficient force production at any distance. Counterintuitively, sprint work helps long-distance runners hold pace for longer before fatiguing.
Where the Fun-Runners Go Wrong
Most amateurs only ever train one intensity, usually a fudged version of threshold. Not easy enough to build the base. Not controlled enough to properly raise the threshold ceiling. Not hard enough to develop VO₂ max. Not specific enough to improve compromised running. Just... moderately hard. Because moderately hard feels like training.
Every intensity has a job:
Z2 / Easy / Long runs build the engine.
Threshold raises the ceiling.
VO₂ max expands your aerobic capacity.
Lactic tolerance teaches you to keep performing when everything burns.
Compromised running teaches you to race with fatigue.
And they don't belong in equal amounts. The base comes first. Everything else sits on top of it. Then you raise the ceiling, then sharpen the top end. As race day approaches, you get more specific with compromised running and carefully placed lactic tolerance work.
Each session solves a different problem. Layer them together in the right order and your running changes completely.
If your pace has looked the same for the last two years, you don't need more, you need more purpose.
Want a tailored training session for your next race that builds your base and progressively increases intensity to build faster, stronger legs, this is what I love!
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