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Cross country is hard..mentally and physically. And ,there’s only one way to prepare and that’s to occasionally visit what I call “that dark and lonely place “in training. Only when you grow accustomed to to the light can you truly find your way.

One of the benchmark sessions for this type of workout is Mile repetitions.A session you would work up to would be 5 x mile with 2 mins recovery (standing rest). You wouldn’t dive into to that though… you would probably start with 4 x mile with 3 mins recovery.

And it’s also not advisable to do this alone as its easy to get lost in the sea of total despair!This type of workout is best done in a team setting/training group where everyone is drawing inspiration from each other. Know your place in the group and set your sights further along the bus..nearer the front. In terms of location, the ideal setting is following the course of your home cross country course. So the first mile is the first mile of your course and so on and so on, working your way round just like the race itself. At the end of each repetition you remain in the same spot with standing rest so that everyone can do there own recovery. Some may jog around..some may lie on the ground in utter exhaustion..the point is you have options!

I used to do this session on a regular basis on a cross country course with a bunch of guys capable of running them well under 5 minutes and until that point the furthest repetitions I did were 1300m repetitions on road. The first few times you do the session just focus on getting through the workout without focusing too much on the intensity. However, once you have developed a taste for it then the following is a good way to approach the workout in terms of breaking it down.

You should be able to cruise through the first mile at a speed that will be close to you average – enjoy it.You should not have done much damage on this first one and you could probably go another 800m at the same speed if pressed. Mile 2 – bang it out. Up the effort marginally to achieve a similar result in terms of time.This one will sets the tone of the workout..if this one feels good you are on for a good one. Mile 3 – time to focus.Concentration is a key now. Make sure the effort is high enough as this and mile 4 are the ones where the time will slip.If one of these miles has a hill always factor that in if the time is slower. Mile 4 this is the critical one – the session is all about this one.Go out with intent forget there’s a fifth – leap of faith.

The fifth is all about use the last remaining fuel wisely. Aggression is good.Be fired up BUT don’t attack the first half. You want to throw it all in but don’t..resist the temptation. Running controlled is in some ways harder than going out hammer and tongs and then die and crawl home. At this point the ability at 800m to go should be marginal but you should have something ..go to the booster rockets to see you home.

How fast to run them?Depends on the course but I would expect you to run them at a pace 1 min / 2 mins faster than your best 10k time round a course. So if you ran 5 x 1 mile round your home XC course and averaged 6.30 then I would expect you could run 40/41 mins in a race. Back in the day I witnessed (from about 20 yards back) one of great friends John Nuttall who went on to win the National Cross Country average 4.40s for for this session and a few weeks later won the NCAA Cross country in 29.31 (10k) which is averaging 4.55 per mile.

I coach at Sevenoaks school and we have done this session a few times now.As an example the top two runners on the team have been averaging 5.30 and are capable of a 34 min 10k round the Knole Run course.

If you looking to do intervals I run a training group at The Walled Garden on Wednesday mornings and Sunday mornings at 9am. See my website for details.

Go for that run in the woods, through the puddles and the mud..great till you get home and then a few days later the sting in the tail..trainers that stink.

Over the years I’ve tried all kinds of things to combat the stink..nothing really works. In the end the loyal of shoes are dispatched to the shed. Hardly seems fair.

But one of the guys I ran with passed on this great tip. Bung them in the freezer. Twenty four hours later and all the bacteria has been killed, let them dry out and your left with shoes as fresh as a summer meadow.

Obviously put them in a bag before bunging them in with your sausages and last summers Rhubarb.

Darrell

One of the problems with intervals and repetitions is their intensity. These sessions can leave you so fatigued that all that you can muster over the next few days is some easy running and only one session like this is possible a week, which can be counterproductive.

We feel rough and sore because of the concentration of lactate produced by intensive exercise in our blood.  We have a lactate threshold which the points at which lactate levels go up in relation to the intensity of the exercise and more lactate is building than is being cleared. This will vary from person to person, runner to runner. The point just before this happens is the lactate threshold and many believe this is the most efficient pace to train as it is the level at which the heart can be exercised for a long period without fatigue ending the workout. .

All runners should include some type of threshold work in their training. There’s abundant proof that doing a little running each week in that moderately high-intensity threshold zone yields better race results than training only at lower intensities or at much higher intensities only.

How fast do you need to run at to be at your lactate threshold? One method would be to find out your Maximum Heart Rate and then look to run at 85% of that maximum for tempo runs and 85 -90% for intervals. Or a more practical approach is to find your lactate threshold by assessing how hard exercise feels at any given moment. One method is to rank exertions on a scale which goes for from 6 to 20 where 6 means “extremely easy” and 20 equates to “extremely” hard. Exertion around 13 is usually found to correspond to the lactate threshold and could be described as “comfortably hard” or “easy speed” or “fairly fast”.

If you are able to push yourself to run hard, but you are in control of your breathing which is deep but not out of control and you are capable of running at that pace for another 3 or 4 minutes then you are probably at your threshold intensity.

An analogy would be to view the workout as if it were weight training for your heart. We all know that going into the weight room lifting the heaviest weight you can muster and leaving is not an effective way to train. Instead you lift many weights at below your maximum to achieve the adaption that will increase your strength and in the case of the heart pump more blood and carry more oxygen.

In the twilight of his career, International Irish miler Marcus O’Sullivan was a late convert to threshold running as he looked to ways to improve his 1500 time.

Prior to the conversion he would do 10 x 1000m on the track with 4 mins jog recovery usually averaging an impressive 2m 45secs. The downside would be that he would have to spend the next few days running easy to recover from this tough workout. And this was beginning to become more of an issue as he began to get older, finding it increasing more difficult to recover from these sessions. Speaking with a triathlon coach and more out of desperation, he agreed to move to lactate threshold training. With a maximum heart rate of 193 that meant he need to run the reps at a pace where his heart did not rise above 155. This meant his 1000m reps, now with just 40 secs rest, slowed to 3.10s. Despite the reps feel too slow he stuck with it for 6 weeks and he was rewarded with his fastest 1500m of his career of 3.35 (down from 3.37) at the age of 35. An improvement he attributes to changing his track work to threshold.

Another way to work out the speed at which you should run your workouts is to use the following touchstone session. Take your best 5K time and add a minute and divide by 5 to get 1000m splits and then add 35 – 40secs. A 19 min 5K runner add a minute to this time (20 mins) and therefore look to run 5 x 1000m in 4mins 35 sec. And with threshold you are looking to have less than 1 min recovery, preferably 40 seconds.

Although associated with middle distance and long distance track running training both repetitions and intervals are great for increasing speed and endurance and I see no reason why all runners can’t adapt these workouts to get benefit.

Runners use these terms repetitions and intervals interchangeably, but there is a difference between the two. In both cases you run over a specified distance and the runs are broken up by a recovery jogs or standing rest. And, unless the session is designed to be at lactate threshold (endurance based) session then the jog will be a very slow jog (just above a walk).

The distinction between intervals and repetitions relates to the jogs or standing rest between each run and to some extent the length of the run.In an Interval session the time spent jogging / standing rest is kept constant ranging from 2 to 3 minutes — usually too short to allow complete recovery. Therefore a session could be expressed as follows:

5 x 1000m with 2 minutes recovery (standing/walk or jog)

With a session like this you would have your recovery near the start of the next run so that runners can do their own recovery in preparation for the next run. Some might need to stay standing while others are able to jog depending on their fitness levels. With such a session you would look to maintain a pace eg 10k race pace but reduce the recovery. A 36min 10K runner would run the mile runs in around 5.40 to 5.50 minutes. Once your average started to get quicker, then you would look to reduce the recovery down and maintain the pace until you got the recovery down to 60secs as a minimum.

During my completive days when I was able to complete 10K cross country races in around 30 minutes or just under I recall with great clarity a weekly session of  5 x 1 mile with  3 mins recovery where I was averaging well under 5 minutes for each effort.

The goal for interval training is to “accumulate” time spent running at a very high level and increase our body’s ability to adapt and eventually run at a sustained, higher anaerobic pace for longer periods.  

For interval workouts, a general guideline for the amount of recovery time between runs should be equal to or less than the time spent running. For example, if we’re running  interval 800s at 4 minute pace, then the recovery time would be 3 minutres.

When designing interval workouts, I tend to choose distances ranging from 800 meters to 2000m (runs ranging three to six minutes). 

The challenge and the benefit of running intervals always comes back to controlling the recovery time, not running faster.

Below is a guide to some interval workouts

You sometimes also here the term speed/endurance. This is where the runs are less than 3 minutes so you might be doing 800m or 600m or 400m repetitions but without ample recovery but at race or faster than race pace. Track runners like Sebastion Coe used this type of training. For instance he would regularly run 6 x 800m on a road loop with 60 to 90 seconds standing rest. He would run these at his 1500m pace ie in under 2 minutes!

With Repetitions (or Repeats or speedwork)  there is a  greater emphasis is placed on hitting times faster than your race pace for each fast run with recovery  adjusted so that those times can be hit, normally expressed in terms distance covered.

Because we are running fast the distance run is generally shorter e.g., 200s, 400s, 600s so that we can repeat themmultiple times. The objective is to “repeat” the distance with the same quality at the end as at the beginning of the workout. We are literally training our body to be able to run at a faster than race pace improve our anaerobic capacity, develop new muscles, build speed, and make us familiar with more rapid, efficient, and fluid leg turnover and be able to relax and feel comfortable at race pace.

Designed for the track runner a 4 minute miler would run 4 x 400m in 56 seconds with 400m jog. He would be running his maximium speed but he would set ample recovery for setting off again. Recovery guidelines for repeats/reps are generally two to four times the amount of time spent running the repeat

Repetitions are sometimes broken down into sets making the work more manageable, making it a hybrid between Repetitions and Intervals. An example would be 3 (3 x300m with 100m jog)500m jog between sets. Notice that the job between sets is long allowing the runner to recover (like repetitions) but the recovery between the 300s is short and the runner will be setting off having not fully recovered.

Similar to repetitions is a  “ladder session” a variation on the same theme and has ample recover between many sets of reps but at different distances. A typical session would be 4 x 400m with 200m jog, (400m jog) then 4 x 300m with 100m jog (400m jog) then 4 x 200m with 200m jog.

A recent article in the Lancet by Prof Lee of Harvard confirms the findings of research that assessed the health benefits of physical activity in a Taiwanese population and if less exercise than the recommended 150 min a week can still have life expectancy benefits.

Compared with individuals in the inactive group, those in the low-volume activity group, who exercised for an average of 92 min per week  or 15 min a day had a 14% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and had a 3 year longer life expectancy.

Every additional 15 min of daily exercise beyond the minimum amount of 15 min a day further reduced all-cause mortality by 4% and all-cancer mortality by 1%. These benefits were applicable to all age groups and both sexes, and to those with cardiovascular disease risks. Individuals who were inactive had a 17%  increased risk of mortality compared with individuals in the low-volume group.

Therefore 15 min a day or 90 min a week of moderate-intensity exercise might be of benefit, even for individuals at risk of cardiovascular disease.

In Britain we come low down the list of countries whose population is active. Inactivity kills the same amount of people as smoking kills, doing nothing is not an option.

By exercising you encourage bone health, increase your immunity to infection and disease and increase circulation.

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A recent study of motivation revealed that one of the main difference between elite and club athletes was relatively lower levels of amotivation among elite athletes ie a greater sense of unwavering purpose.Both groups are motivated in a similar way by Extrinsic motivations eg Money status, social approval and Intrinsic drivers like fun and passion.

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