PUBLISHED 02/07/2006
The findings made sense:
I had spent the winter months shuffling through the snow, faithfully getting in my 120-mile weeks, but I hadn't been making my weekly pilgrimage to the track for speedwork. For many runners, winter is a time of aerobic maintenance. The cold weather and sloppy conditions cause us to slow down and just put in the miles.
Trudging long and slow through the winter certainly isn't all bad. Such arduous workouts develop slow-twitch muscle fibers, enhance your ability to burn fat, and improve endurance. But as the pavement becomes visible, runners hoping to regain their prewinter form need to start adding tempo runs and a combo of long and short intervals into the training mix.
As you work in tempo runs, you'll build on the aerobic benefits you accrued over the winter and boost cardiac muscle development. Through a combination of long and short intervals, you'll develop the fast-twitch muscle fibers that were largely ignored over the past few months, and you'll increase your ability to buffer lactic acid, allowing you to run faster, longer without fatiguing.
Since it's difficult to jump right from slow aerobic runs into speedwork, try the three workouts at right (you can add one or two of them per week) to transition from winter slog to spring speed.
