Today's guest post is by Karen Welby.  Coach Karen is a Holistic Health Coach, Running Coach and Personal Trainer.  Today she shares a blog on building speed and learning pacing through track work outs.

Track Workout for Runners – Repeat 400s

By CoachKaren 

Whether you’re training for a 5k or a half marathon, this workout is perfect to help you learn pacing. When I was a Cross Country Coach at Stevens Institute of Technology, we would run this workout every 3-4 weeks during the Cross Country season, increasing reps and decreasing rest (and speed) as the season progressed.

I recently had one of my half marathon clients run this workout and she did great – running every 400 faster than goal half marathon pace.

Running Workout = 16 x 400meters with 60-75 seconds rest

The breakdown:

Warm up for 1 mile run – nice and easy

Stretch – A mix of dynamic and static stretching

(4) 50- 70meter strides (Running at 75% of all out pace) This gets the legs moving and blood flowing.

Head down to the starting line. You will be performing 16 400s (400 meters = 1 lap, so 16 laps) at slightly under goal race pace. If you have any questions about pace, tweet me @coach_karenw.

The rest between each 400 is 60 – 75 seconds.

Cool down for 1 mile – nice and easy

Download the 400m spreadsheet here to record your times: 400M Repeats Track Workout.

The goal of this workout is to get you moving faster than race pace with rest, so that running at race pace with no rest feels comfortable.

About the Author: Karen Welby is a certified Holistic Health Coach, Running Coach and Personal Trainer.  For more about Karen’s integrative health and fitness coaching programs, visit Run With Nutrition. She can be found on Twitter(@coach_karenw), Facebook (Run with Nutrition) and Pinterest (coachkarenw)