Track Strides
- Develops speed and serves as race-pace practice
- A session for the track
Performing a series of strides on the track is a good way of breaking up a longer run while getting in race-pace practice in a track environment.
The Session
It's natural to divide a running track into 4 x 100m sections and striding 100m on the straights and jogging 100m for recovery round the bends can work well for strides performed at 1500m-5k pace.
When running faster than 1500m pace, 100m can be a little too far to stride and a little too short for decent recovery. A similar session involves just continuing the jog recovery for 20 metres or so coming off the bend, and then starting the recovery jog about 20 metres early going in to the bend.
Another option when performing faster strides is to include the odd full lap jog recovery.
Variations
Stride Bends
An obvious alternative is to jog the straights and stride the bends. Important for proper race simulation.
Vary the session even more by hitting a range of different race paces. E.g. a few laps with strides at 5000m pace, a few laps with strides at 1500m pace, then 3000m pace and so on.
