Monitoring the Specificity of Your Run Training

In his latest article, Matt Fitzgerald explains the importance of keeping track of how your training becomes more specific as you do more running in a pace range that's close to your race goal pace. By monitoring your training specificity, you can improve your training and your race performance.

The essential difference between working out and training is that training has a direction. If your goal is to stay where you are—to avoid gaining weight, for example—then working out, or exercising in more or less the same way day after day, week after week, is OK. But if you’re a competitive runner who sets performance goals for race events, your workouts must evolve in a way that moves your body in the direction of peak performance.

How do we characterize this “direction” that your training requires?  It has a twofold quality.  First, your training must become increasingly stressful.  Stress is used here in the physiological sense.  It is the combined volume and intensity of your training, or training workload, which is quantified very effectively by the chronic training load (CTL) variable in Training Peaks WKO+ software.  When the CTL line on your Performance Management Chart has an upward slope, your training stress or workload is increasing.  The greater your CTL value is, the fitter you are.

The second directional quality that your training needs to express is increasing specificity.  The term specificity refers to the pace distribution of your training relative to your goal pace for the next important race. Your training becomes more specific as you do more running in a pace range that’s close to your goal race pace.

Many runners make the mistake of focusing too much on their overall training workload and not enough on their training specificity.  One reason for this bias is that it’s not easy to monitor training specificity using only a stopwatch and a training diary. But Training Peaks WKO+ has a couple of tools that make it easy to monitor the specificity of your run training.

The Pace Distribution Graph

The first of these tools is the Pace Distribution graph, which shows the percentage of your total running time and the absolute amount of running time you spent within each 30-second pace band (6:00-6:30/mile, 6:30-7:00/mile, etc.) in your recent training. The graph is preset to show your pace distribution over the past 28 days, but I recommend that you customize it to show the last seven days and analyze the graph at the end of each training week.

What should you look for? Look to see that the total amount of time you spend running in the 30-second pace band within which your goal race pace falls tends to increase from week to week. For example, if you’re training for a marathon and your goal pace is 7:20/mile, track the amount of running you do in the 7:00-7:30 pace band. It doesn’t have to increase every week, but it should only decrease in recovery and taper weeks. It should increase most toward the end of the training cycle, as your peak race nears, when maximizing your efficiency and fatigue resistance at your goal race pace becomes your highest priority.

Many runners make the mistake of focusing too much on their overall training workload and not enough on their training specificity.

Secondarily, look to see that the total amount of time you spend running in your race-pace range band and all faster pace bands also tends to increase from week to week. So, for example, if you’re training for a 10K and your goal pace is 6:15 per mile, track the total amount of time you spend running in the pace bands covering 6:30/mile to 4:00/mile. This will give you a better sense of whether your training is becoming more specific in the early part of the training cycle, when you should limit the amount of running you do very close to race pace to avoid triggering an early peak yet the amount of faster-than-race-pace running you do should increase to build a reserve of speed.

Don’t bother paying too much attention to the percentage of your total running time that you spend running in each pace range. This is less indicative of whether your training is becoming more specific because it is affected by changes in volume.  For example, when you are training for a marathon your weekly running mileage is likely to increase throughout the training cycle, such that the percentage of time you spend running in your race pace range will not increase much even though the total amount of time you run in this range—hence the specificity of your training—does.

The Pace Zone Distribution Graph

A second Training Peaks WKO+ tool allows you to monitor your training specificity in a very similar way. That’s the Pace Zone Distribution graph, which shows the total amount of running time and the percentage of your running time you spent within each of the 10 Pace Zone Index paces zones in your recent training. Again, customize this graph to show your distribution over the past seven days and analyze it weekly.

Look to see that the total amount of time you spend in the pace zone associated with your goal race pace tends to increase from week to week. 5K pace falls in the VO2max pace zone, 10K Pace in either Grey Zone III (faster runners) or the Threshold pace zone (slower runners), half-marathon pace in either the Threshold zone (faster runners) or Grey Zone II (slower runners), and marathon pace in the High Aerobic pace zone.

Secondarily, look to see that the total amount of time you spend running in all of the pace zones from Threshold to Speed tends to increase throughout the training cycle. Give more attention to this measure in the first half of the training cycle and more to the specific zone associated with your race pace in the latter half of the training cycle.

Successful training is all about moving in the right direction, which means increasing both the stress level and the specificity of your training. Now you’re better equipped to monitor the latter.