Stop Calling It Speed Work: Why "Race Pace Work" Is the Right Term for High School Track Coaches
đź“Ś KEY TAKEAWAYS
- "Speed work" is a misnomer – 1600m race pace for most high school runners isn't fast
- A 35-second 200 (4:40 boy) or a 40-second 200 (5:20 girl) is not speed
- True speed = max velocity for roughly 40 meters – that's what sprinters do
- Replace "speed work" with "race pace work" in your vocabulary and your athletes' mental models
- Identify each athlete's next logical step, then groove that pace in workouts
- This framework applies to cross country, the mile, and even the marathon
Watch the full video:
You can also listen to this on the Coaching Runners Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The Problem with "Speed Work"
If you're a high school running coach and you use the term "speed work" – or you tell your athletes, "Hey, today we're doing a speed workout" – what do you mean by that?
Let's say you have some boys who can run 4:40 in the 1600 and girls who can run 5:20. I picked some easy numbers for the math.
That's 70-second quarters for the boys. That's 80-second quarters for the girls. A 70-second 400 is a 35-second 200. An 80-second 400 is a 40-second 200. That's a 22-second 100 for the girl.
That is not fast.
So if we call that workout "speed work," that's not right.
So what do we mean when we say "speed?" Is it speed development? Is it running as fast as we can for 40 meters? That's probably closer to the definition of speed. But running 35-second 200s? That's not speed.
To put some numbers to this, if that girl who can run 5:20 could run 2:12* someday for an 800, that's 66-second quarters. That's 33-second 200s. 16.5 for a 100m. For a high school girl, 33-second 200s – that is getting faster.
So when we go from 1600 meter pace – and pace is an important word – down to 800 meter pace, we're getting faster. There's a continuum here, and I like this idea of where speed actually lives on that continuum.
*I know that's a big jump – 5:20 to 2:12 – but it highlights the point that 20 second 100s are slow but 16.5 second 100s are starting to get fast(ish).
What Speed Actually Is
Let's go all the way to the other end of the continuum. You're at an intersection. A child starts to walk through the intersection. There's cars coming. What do you do? You sprint, grab the child, run to the other side.
That is speed. That is the fastest a human can run. That's what we're talking about with speed.
We all love watching the 100m at the US Championships or the World Championships or the Olympics. Even in the 100m, a human is not able to maintain max velocity for all 100m. There's an acceleration phase, then they're holding max velocity, and then they decelerate. The best sprinters in the world "delay the deceleration" by doing the first two "phases" well, but even for them, they can't run their fastest for all 100m.
The human body – and there's going to be people who know more about this than me – can run at max velocity for roughly 40m. You can accelerate into that, hold it, and run out of it.
Should a distance runner do this kind of work? That's not what we're going to talk about today, but I would like to talk about speed development at some point. I love what John O'Malley, the boys coach at Sandburg High School, said about high school distance athletes – that they're really bad at acceleration mechanics. But again, let's save this for another conversation.
They've Got To Run Race Pace or Faster
In Consistency Is Key, there's a chapter that athletes have really gravitated towards called "Fast, Faster, Fastest." We'll talk about that in a later video. There's also a chapter that says they've gotta run race pace or faster.
So let's keep using our girl who can run 5:20. Her PR is 80-second 400m repetitions, right? So she's got to practice running 79s. 78s. I really like 78 for this athlete, because if she could run four 78-second 400s – 78 means 1:18, a minute and 18 seconds – she's going to run 5:12.
How exciting is that?
And that's what we're looking at with the 4:40 boy too. He's running 70-second 400s. Could he run 68? Could he run 4:32? Who wouldn't like that jump in a year? Let's say you had a sophomore who really put in a nice winter. He was at 4:40 last year, runs 4:32. That's a nice jump. Sure, we're hoping for 4:28 – so breaking 4:30 – but eight seconds in a year and a 4:32 PR is really good.
So now the question is – you're calling these 400 repeats "speed work." I want you to use the idea of race pace work instead.
Race Pace in a Cross Country Context
I was fortunate to run at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1998 on the team that's featured in Running with the Buffaloes.
There's a workout in this book that nobody's ever asked me about. It's very simple. You run 300m, then jog 200m. Back and forth, on a field where the perimeter is basically 300m. This is all happening in Boulder, Colorado, at roughly 5,200 feet of elevation. That's a mile of elevation – solid altitude. If you're at sea level and you're fit, you might not notice it on the flat Boulder Creek Path. But when you start to go uphill, you're definitely going to notice it. And if you raced any distance from a mile to a marathon, you would absolutely feel it.
At altitude, you can't do repeat 2Ks at race pace without taking enormous rest. But this workout? You just do it over and over. You do your 300, jog 200 – that's 500 meters. Each set of two is a thousand meters. You could do 8k or 10k of work in this workout (for a college athlete). And you're basically touching on race pace the entire time.
The 300s are at cross country race pace. And here's the tricky part – the first time I did this workout, when we got to that 200m recovery, I'm thinking, "We're not recovering at all." It's more of a fartlek-type workout where you're going a challenging pace, and that recovery is what we'd call a steady pace. But those 300s are at race pace.
That was my first introduction to this concept: you've gotta be running race pace. And it worked. We had a really good cross country team.
I coached a guy named Brent Vaughn who won the US Cross Country Championship. We did that same workout – 10 days out from the race. He did at least 10K of it, maybe 12k, which maybe doesn't seem like a lot, but it was. And because he could nail that workout, I knew he was fit enough to run that race. More importantly, he knew he was fit enough.
That's race pace.
Race Pace in a Marathon Context
In Simple Marathon Training, there was a time where I helped adult runners with the marathon. If you want to run 3:30 pace in the marathon, you need to dial in 3:23–3:25 all the time. It's all about building your aerobic engine – that's what we talk about with the car analogy in these free chapters in Consistency Is Key. You've got to build the aerobic engine, strengthen the chassis with all that post-run work, and rev the engine with strides. Even adults are doing strides as part of their easy days. They're revving the engine, they're doing all the post-run work.
But the big thing – the big unlock, the reason that book has helped so many people – is that you are "grooving race pace." You're grooving a pace that's a little bit faster than your goal pace.
Now, is 3:30 marathon pace fast? No. Even six-minute pace – which works out to roughly a 2:37 marathon – even six-minute pace isn't fast. That's 90-second 400s. That's a 45-second 200m. It's not fast. But it's something you have to maintain for a long time.
If your Boston qualifier is 3:15, what the book teaches you to do is groove 3:10. The same principle applies whether you're coaching a marathoner or a high school miler. The paces aren't fast. They need to be practiced until they're automatic.
Replace the Term, Change the Mental Model
You as the coach have to identify what race pace is. I don't want you to use the term "speed" anymore, because what we've established is that it's not fast.
Now, if you have kids sprinting for 40m, that's fast. I like to do something called a 150m in-and-out: build up for 50m on the curve – you can put two cones out at the 100m start and the middle of the home stretch – they run fast for 50m, and then their momentum takes them out 50m to the finish. Build up 50m, run fast for 50m, run out for 50m. That's much closer to "speed" than 200s in 35 seconds or 40 seconds.
If you told me, "Jay, we do speed development and we do in-and-outs," I'd give you a B-plus, A-minus for that. True speed development is more of that max-velocity type work. But what we know is we've gotta run race pace or faster.
The Next Logical Step
So let's go back to our 5:20 girl. What's the next logical step? Maybe the next logical step is 5:16. Now we're going from 80-second 400s to 79s. And then maybe the long stretch goal this year is 78s. That's 5:12. And then obviously there's all the times in between, but that's a great "I know I can do this goal" and a stretch goal.
It's late February and here in the state of Colorado, high schools start the last week of February for official state-sanctioned practice. There's a big meet at Niwot the third week of March. Kids are going to be rocking.
The question is – if they run an early-season time trial in late February, or a time trial beginning of March, or a low-key meet the second week of March – what race pace should they be identifying at that meet? That's the work heading into track season. Use early races to establish current race pace, then groove a pace that's one step faster.
What We Did Today
We took "speed work" out of your vocabulary. We replaced it with "race pace work." And we have a framework to think about where we are in February – our 4:40 boy, our 5:20 girl – and what the next logical step looks like for each of them.
What we're going to talk about next is some of the workouts they should be doing to run those races. Stay tuned.
If you want to dive deeper into structuring your track season, check out the Track Training System. And if your athletes haven't read Consistency Is Key, the chapter on running race pace or faster is exactly what we've been talking about here. You can get it for free here.
About Coach Jay Johnson
Jay Johnson has coached high school, collegiate, and professional runners for over two decades, including three USATF champions in cross country, indoor track, and road racing. He studied kinesiology and applied physiology at the University of Colorado, where he was a member of the varsity cross country team featured in Chris Lear's cult-classic Running with the Buffaloes. His book Consistency Is Key has sold over 20,000 copies. Jay has been quoted in Wired, Outside, and Runner's World, and his YouTube channel has over 2.9 million views.
Jay Johnson
