of running workouts that you can do. Now, a lot of people think that, to be a runner,

you just go out and do a general distance run all the time. There's so much more you

can do though, and I'll explain five different running workouts here today. Now, for all

of these workouts, you should do a warm up and a cool down before and after the run.

The first one that I am going to talk about is called the long run. It's the simplest

one. Let's say you're training for a marathon, the long run would be the most important workout

you can do if you're training for a longer race like the marathon or half marathon. Once

a week, you should do a long run that is a lot longer than your typical distance run.

When you train for a half marathon, you should work your long run up to at least ten miles.

When you're training for a marathon, your longest run before the marathon should be

18 miles at least, and some people go all the way up to 22, so they're comfortable knowing

that they'll be able to finish the race. The second one I'm going to talk about are called

Fartleks. This is kind of a strange workout because of the name because during a distance

run, you pick up the pace during the run. So, you go out for a typical distance run.

Let's say it's a five mile run, and during that run, you would pick up the pace for a

minute, and then slow down back to your regular run pace, and then you do it again. You do

this multiple times. I try to do at least five one minute pick ups during a distance

run, and then call it a Fartlek run. There are so many other ways you can do it. My wife

used to do a workout called 30-30s. 30 seconds fast, 30 seconds slow, 30 seconds fast, and

do like ten of those in a row. Then go back to a regular distance run pace. The third

workout I'm going to talk about is called a tempo run. Now, a tempo run is similar to

a distance run in the fact that you just run for a specific time, however, you try to run

at a faster pace than a typical distance run. Now, for a 5k runner, you would want to take

your 5k pace for the whole race, figure it out, and then run about 30 seconds slower

per mile for your tempo run for about 20 minutes. So, you're looking at running a longer period

of time at a quicker pace, but not race pace. It's a little slower than your race pace,

but your run it for a long period of time. It's hard to do. It's hard to get used to,

but it's a great workout. My fourth workout. One of the toughest ones is called a progressive

run. Now a progressive run is just what it sounds like. You progressively get faster

as you go through the run. So, you start at your typical distance run pace, and then every

mile, or every five minutes you get faster until you're running at about race pace at

the end of the distance run. It's very tough, but it teaches you how to finish a run faster,

or finish your race faster. So you have strength coming towards the end of a race. That's called

the progressive run. The last type of running workout I'm going to bring up, they're very

popular. They're called interval workouts. Interval workouts are different than all the

other workouts I've talked about because you typically run very hard for a period of time,

you stop, you recover from that, and then you run very hard again, and you repeat it.

One of the more popular types of interval workouts is one mile repeats. You do a warm

up, then you run a mile hard. Take a break and another mile hard. Take a break, and run

another mile hard, and then you do a cool down. Intervals can be all sorts of things.

There's cut down intervals, where you start with a longer run, then shorter, then shorter,

shorter. Finally, you're down to like a little sprint at the end of the interval workout.

But whatever interval that you do, the key is to run hard, manage your rest time, that

means stay on a specific amount of rest, then run hard again, then stick to the same amount

of rest, then run hard again. Let's say I'm doing that mile repeat workout. If I want

to do a hard one mile repeat workout, I'll run the mile fast, give five minutes of rest

time. Run the next mile fast, another five minutes of rest time, and then the last mile.

If I'm working more on endurance instead of speed, I'll run a one mile relatively fast,

only take one minute of rest. Then run another mile relatively fast, one minute of rest,

and another mile. That's like a way to use intervals to build endurance instead of speed.

I hope some of these different types of running workouts are things you can incorporate into

your plans. But remember, do a warm up and a cool down before these types of running

workouts. Happy Trails.