One of the biggest challenges facing new runners is speedwork • What is it? • Is it necessary? • How much do I need to do? • Will I get injured? Over the next week or so, I’ll look at different types of speedwork and give some suggestions of sessions you could do in that particular area. But to answer our original questions: What is speedwork? In the SMART training system, it is any running done at faster than steady state. So, any time you run at a pace that is faster than your normal running training speed. For example, if instead of your normal 3 miles steady run, you run the first mile easy, the second mile as fast as you can to see how fast you’ll do it and then the third mile easy – that is speedwork. It can be … [Read more...]