A Tempo Run by Many Other Names
The T-word Describes a Specific--and Very Useful--Workout
By Kevin Beck
As featured in the December 1999 issue of Running Times Magazine
After watching the first two dozen victims drift across the finish line of a local five-miler one steamy morning last summer, I tracked down a friend, an accomplished road warrior with a 26:00 PR for the distance. A quick look at the guy—he was slouched over a fence and muttering to himself—suggested he’d made no concessions to the smothering July heat and humidity. Turns out he had finished somewhat below his usual spot in the regional pecking order, and I asked him—gingerly—how he felt about his race. "Ahhh," he grumbled, flinging sweat into my face with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I ended up basically doing a tempo run."
Oh, I see. And this "tempo run" had ended in a grunting, flailing sprint to the finish to reel in a long-haired fellow with a nipple ring. I asked my friend about his splits.
"Went out in 5:00, 5:15. Didn’t check the third mile, but by then I was feeling it and didn’t care. I just kind of cruised in." Another wave.
This time I dodged the sweat-bullets and thought: He’d run his first mile faster than his 5K race pace. Tempo run?
Another friend reported doing a recent "two-mile tempo run," with the first mile in 5:14 and the second in 5:34. The uneven pacing was no surprise to me; she had recently run a peak-effort 5K at 5:25 pace, which suggests she was sucking a lot of air after the first mile of her workout.
This pattern of extremely ambitious "tempo runs" seems to be on the rise. Imprudent use of the t-word is endemic among runners, and the above examples clearly indicate that even seasoned, top-notch competitors either don’t know or don’t care what a tempo run really is. This is surprising, because the term is clearly and simply defined by coaches and exercise physiologists. And this is not a matter of nit-picking semantics; doing a tempo run incorrectly greatly compromises its training benefits.
The Real (and Unreal) Thing
The term "tempo run" is to distance running in the ’90s what Studio 54 was to ’70s decadence: Tossing it around separates the wannabes from the in-crowd. It’s a key staple in the training diet, to be sure, but very few seem to know just what the recipe calls for.