‘Speed Endurance’ is the most misunderstood and misused phrase in Athletics

A common microcycle for a 100m sprinter may include a day for Acceleration (~0-40m), Top Speed (~50-60m) and ‘Speed Endurance’ (~120-300m). That sentence alone should be alarming to read. There is a glaring hole in a microcycle that is organised like this.

Currently in Australian Athletics, Speed Endurance is commonly misunderstood as ‘Lactate Training’. Athletes and coaches often wear the lactate training badge of honour for enduring the pain, the headaches, the cramps, the chunder, the ‘ticker’; and alongside the belief that the gut wrenching session they’ve just completed has improved their toughness (lol), is the belief that they’ve improved the finishing component of their 100m sprint. In my opinion, this belief is false. They’ve improved their glycolytic energy system and in my opinion, for a 100m sprinter, this is not as important as common training strategies suggest they are.

Speed Endurance should be recognised as its name suggests, as the endurance of speed. To properly train Speed Endurance, one must be close to max velocity and attempt to maintain it. If an athlete is undergoing intense acidosis, they will not be able to reach close enough to max velocity to improve their capacity to maintain speed; or to decrease their rate of deceleration. This is where the misunderstanding lies. Lactate work is too slow and typical top speed work, albeit intense and necessary, doesn’t last long enough. Instead of viewing Speed Endurance as the training of the ability to “run through pain”, coaches and athletes should view it as ‘Deceleration Training’. In understanding this, coaches should recognise that true Speed Endurance work, similar to Top Speed work, is as intense as training comes for a 100m sprinter.

Training repetitions should be between 80-120m. Perhaps coaches may like to play around with the idea of emphasising the intensification of speeds between particular brackets during the run (e.g. running a 90m run as 30m fast, 30m floating, 30m fast). I’ve recently been asking my athlete to have an easy acceleration, as to not completely exert himself at that point of the repetition, and to try hit max speeds at 60m and maintain until 90m. Due to the intense nature of these repetitions, he can usually only squeeze out 3 or 4 worthwhile efforts, and I think that’s the way it should be.

If an athlete has a weak finish to their 100m run, a coach is negligent if they default to the idea of more lactate work. I would probably start by actually looking at what the acceleration looks like. Observe the postures. Are they appropriate for that point of the race? Does the way they run at 20m look the way it should be at 40m? If so, has the athlete just added an extra 20m of upright running to his race? It’s demanding to be upright for that long. Is the athlete’s max velocity good enough? Having a high max velocity gives you a place to actually delecerate from. And then, from that point, can they maintain their max velocity (observe their posture during this time, too) and what is their declaration like? If your training is set up the way which I detailed early in this article, are you training the maintenance of max velocity? Are you training to decrease the rate of deceleration? Or are you just getting ‘fitter’?

If you refuse to change your terminology in regards to Speed Endurance, then I implore you to view this type of training as Max Velocity Maintenance and Deceleration. In my (extremely rookie and new to the game) opinion, these qualities are more important than the development of the lactate system and are often neglected.

DM me to chat more because I need to learn more about this.