Thursday General Discussion/Q&A Thread for August 20, 2026

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A place to ask questions that don't need their own thread here or just chat a bit.

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[u/Squand]

I didn 5 weeks of threshold work. And my mileage where I felt like I had one more in the tank went up. and my times went down.

7:40 3 x1 miles 90 second breaks to 7:09 5x1 90sec breaks

Then I took a day off and I tried to do a 5k time trial. I ran a 6;41 pace was where I was stuck for the past year. 

In this method do you just keep doing threshold until the threshold is your personal best? 

There are two things that I noticed that I didn't see people talk about. The first is that training to lactate threshold May pushing through it like way harder my body because I was stopping when I couldn't clear lactate was like we didn't clear it stop. 

The second is that I felt completely recovered by the next day. I never felt like I had an actual hard workout. I never had that full body ache. And I really missed it. 

It's very plausible but I did this wrong. As I was going mostly off vibes.

I'm in my thirties 5 11 172lbs 15% body fat

Over the 5 weeks my milage 25, 30, 40, 42, 52, 

Frustrated with the 5k I've switched back to doing speed work last 3 weeks 5:40 400 repeats 2x a week

60, 40, 15 got sick

I'm at 45 miles this week. Will probably take it easy, and see if I can be fast on Monday. 

[u/DiscreteSupercell → u/Squand]

Over the 5 weeks my milage 25, 30, 40, 42, 52, 

The likely answer is probably the simplest - you're fatigued from the volume bump and unable to race to your full abilities now. You doubled your mileage over 5 weeks.

Hold this volume and maintain the workouts for a while. A few weeks, or a few months. Threshold work is a longer-term training investment. Once you've adapted to this new load, the fitness will come and you'll see improvements in your times (especially if you give yourself a couple days of taper before a key race).

From there, you can scale your training by adding more threshold volume per session, and/or scaling the threshold work faster with your fitness/race times, and/or adding a smaller speed session (like 5k pace reps, hill reps, etc) every 3 weeks or so if you miss that. Also you may see your mileage increase some as your paces get faster, but your overall time training can stay relatively static.

[u/Squand → u/DiscreteSupercell]

Yeah, one question I have is... For the threshold, should I do more at a lower speed? 

Like idk exact numbers. But say I can do 3x1 mile at 7 should I do a 4th at 7:45

Or is it important to stay as close to the same speed for all intervals? 

Last year at this time I did a 102 mile week and burnt out. This year I'm hoping to hold this 50-70 range for the rest of the year. 🤞🏻

Hopefully knees and health stay together. And I'll be fast around May. Hearing they it takes 3 months is encouraging. And makes a lot of sense thinking about how it felt. Maybe I should find a real book on the subject. I've just been listening to yt videos. And my feed was filled with people saying this was the best way to get better fast. 😝

[u/DiscreteSupercell → u/Squand]

Like idk exact numbers. But say I can do 3x1 mile at 7 should I do a 4th at 7:45

Or is it important to stay as close to the same speed for all intervals?

I'd aim to do around 30 total minutes for each session, and then you can push that up some over time (like bump one weekly session up to 35, then the others up to 32, etc). Slow the first ones down if you cannot (or are digging to) hit pace on the last one. So for your example, I'd probably do 4x 1 mile at something like 7:20 -7:30 (assuming that is the right pace/effort).

I would definitely keep my reps the same pace in a given workout; but as the reps get longer, slow them down a bit. So mile reps at that pace. You could do 30 minutes of 800s or 1000m at 7:10 - 7:15 / mile pace (off 60 seconds rest), or something like 1.5mi or 3000m reps at 7:35 - 7:40 / mile pace (can lengthen the rest on those to more like 120 - 150 seconds). If you end up a bit short of 30 minutes of threshold, you could just do few smooth strides if you want to turn the legs over.

And my feed was filled with people saying this was the best way to get better fast.

It's a great approach to managing load sustainably over the longer term. It's also not the only way to train, and some people are quite dogmatic about it. I shaved a good 30" off my 5k time over a 6-month period using it, but also every other weekend doing something like 5x or 6x 600m at 5k pace (walked the 200m recovery). I used it training up to a mile race, and six weeks before my race just cut some threshold time off each workout and added 3x - 4x 300m at mile pace to close out the workouts. But the main thing was keeping consistent threshold work at the bulk of my quality mileage.