Interval talk

Steve makes an excellent point in his comment regarding the Irish Times article I linked yesterday. Zatopek was a machine, and it can be argued with plenty of merit that he is the greatest male distance runner who ever lived.

However legendary his 400-meter workouts were, we do not know for certain how fast he was doing them and how much recovery he was using. For all we know, he was doing "tempo" type workouts with his 400s -- that is to say, a lot of them pretty fast, but not like traditional intervals or reps. The bottom line is, he was doing a lot of running, and much of it was probably fast.

But again: Not all intervals are created equal. You need to be armed with all the information.

One popular but grueling workout that a lot of high school coaches have used is to have runners complete a 200-meter interval every minute. In other words, if you run a 35-second 200, you get a 25-second recovery. It is deceptively hard, and the "deceptively" part of that disappears when you get up into double digits for the 200s. It's just plain hard.

Of course, as one wiseguy pointed out to me years ago, one could simply run a 200-meter "interval" in a minute, take no recovery, and keep going -- basically, jogging 8-minute mile pace around the track.

This is not to suggest that the Czech Express of yore was a slacker. He was, in fact, one of the toughest tough guys our sport has ever known. To think that he was ripping out 100 quarters a day in 65 might be a romantic notion, but it's probably not the truth, either.