Speed Endurance

The purpose of speed endurance is to prolong the amount of time at which a near optimal speed can be maintained. This is particularly useful for sprinters, but will be of benefit to those running longer distances as well.

Again technique is important with speed endurance, with relaxation being of prime importance because once the athlete starts to "tighten up" the degradation of speed is accelerated.

It is often useful for you to think about running as "tall and relaxed" as possible, with the height being attained by maintaining the level of the hips as high as possible.

The range of these sessions for sprinters will usually be runs of between 6 and 30 seconds where there is nearly complete recovery between each of the runs (particularly if they are near the upper limit of this time).

However, for longer distance runners speed endurance can be increased to up to about 3 minutes, provided there is good recovery between the runs. A marathon runner, for example, would view 1000m repetitions at their 5000m race pace as speed endurance.

Regardless of the type of runner, a typical session may consist of, say, 5-7 repetitions with about 2-3 minutes recovery for distance runners and about 5-8 minutes for sprinters.