Can You Keep Time?

British indoor 1500m championturned coach lewis moses tells matt long why it’s crucial to include tempo runs in your training

- Matt Long

It is summer 1964 and with the Tokyo Olympics still a couple of months away, a New Zealand athlete in his mid-twenties is about to move into a new phase in his periodised training cycle which has been set by his famous coach Arthur Lydiard.

Having spent months on both aerobic base building and hill training, Peter Snell, the reigning Olympic 800m champion is heading off to the Waikari range in northern Canterbury for a tempo run.

Snell is closing in on one of the most audacious double attempts in Olympic history. Fifty-five years later – and with another Tokyo Olympics on the horizon – coach Lewis Moses joins the Steve Cram Training Camp in Rutland to explain why tempo training can produce such world beating results.

What is tempo running?

“It goes by a number of names - ‘steady state’, ‘LT1’, ‘threshold running’ and ‘lactate running’,” explains Moses. “It’s the one area athletes fall down on because either they don’t understand it or are not comfortable unless they are running flat out.”

In physiological terms, a tempo run is conducted at the level at which the body has the ability to clear as much lactate as it produces – it’s basically the fastest pace at which you can run aerobically. When further explaining the continuous nature of this mode of running Moses, who during his career ran for Britain at the World Indoors in 2012, adds: “It involves a prolonged duration of activity at 80-85% of your maximum effort.”

What are the benefits of tempo running?