NAZ Workouts: Classic Track Cutdown

THE DETAILS: 1600-1600-1200-1k-800-600-400 with 400 jog recovery.

AN EXAMPLE: HOKA NAZ Elite head coach Alan Culpepper has been slowly but surely callousing the minds and the bodies of our athletes to some of the classic VO2 Max sessions necessary to race at a high level. This week he put Wesley Kiptoo and Alex Masai through what many call a “cutdown” workout on the track where each repeat gets both shorter and faster as you go. With only a little more than a week-and-a-half to the Falmouth Road Race, their final race of the 2022 summer season, this workout was their last really hard effort before the big day. They nailed it (watch the video below!).

QUOTES: “I’m so glad Alex was here. For me it was tough, but I was counting each lap and thinking of it like that. I was like, ‘Oh man, if Alex can do it I, I don’t want to let Alex down.’ We’re great teammates.” – Wesley

“When I came [to the track] I knew it was going to be hard. I was ready to do the work. Through the day I was thinking about it like a race day, sitting, drinking water and getting nutrition in. [Falmouth] is my last race as a rookie and watch out for that day.” – Alex

HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF: First of all, you can play with the volume. Knocking off one of the 1600s would be the obvious way to start. That leaves you at right about 3.5 miles of hard work on the day. Of course, if you’re a higher volume runner, then keeping both 1600s is totally fine. It’s not as much about how fast you are as it is about how much mileage you’re used to. So that’s the volume side of things, now let’s get to the pace. In the example above, Alex and Wesley started at 4:33 for the first 1600 but remember we did the session at 7,000ft so there’s a bit of a conversion there. To make it easy let’s just say you want to start out at your 10k pace, or maybe just a touch faster. After that it’s kind of easy. You just try to average 1-second per lap faster on each repeat from there on in. Alex and Wesley ran 4:33 (68-seconds per lap), then 4:28 (67), 3:17 (65.6), 2:44 (65.5), 2:09 (64.5), 1:33 (62), 58.

END

Hope you enjoyed this edition of our “NAZ Workouts.” Stay tuned for another edition coming out next week!! 

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