The early 1970s saw British Milers Club founder Frank Horwill MBE introduce a 5-Tier System of multi-tier training. Frank trained a famous Loughborough University based athlete using this system, namely Tim Hutchings, who placed 4th over 5000m at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and whose voice you may well have heard more recently as a BBC and Eurosport athletics commentator alongside Steve Cram!

The multi-paced system originally involved progressing athletes through 5 different paced sessions over a specified cyclical training microcycle typically over a number of days. The specific paces which Horwill used were 400m, 800m, 1500m, 3000m and 5000m paces. You can probably tell that this suited track athletes operating over the middle distances more than the road running fraternity. Indeed, another famous Loughborough University alumni, the Chancellor of this very University, Lord Sebastian Coe- double Olympic champion, was not averse to this kind of multi-paced system originally devised by the aforementioned Horwill.

So in taking the above how about we develop our own multi-tier system using five paces more attuned to endurance running based on a NLC RPE scale (rate of perceived exertion) 

The RPE scale starts with a 1 out of 10 which is ‘Extremely Easy’ all the way through to a 10 out of 10 which is ‘Flat Out’.

Main session

6 mins @ 6/10 RPE (steady zone)

5 mins @ 7/10 RPE (tempo zone) 

4 mins @ 8/10 RPE (threshold zone)

3 mins @ 9/10 RPE (vo2max zone) 

2 mins @ 9/10 RPE – subtle increase of effort from the 3mins (vo2maxzone) 

We will hit the 2 mins @ 5k pace just once and then head back up the Pyramid.

*2mins recovery – see below

Significantly this session will expose you to not one, not two but three differential modes of recovery, namely walking, jogging and floating. Walking and jogging are self explanatory but the float is best articulated as a steady run because its biomechanically different to a jog and best articulated as a ‘roll on’ recovery by esteemed Oregon based coach Peter Thompson. 

So the coaches present will encourage you to float when moving between marathon paced to half marathon paced efforts and again between half marathon and threshold based efforts. You will be instructed to jog in between the more aerobically based efforts and will then be told to walk between the efforts which take you past the point of threshold paced. This is because each of the 5 paced efforts have a different energy system contribution. The basic principle is the faster you run a particular rep the more passive the recovery needs to be and the slower you run a rep the more active the recovery should be. 

The above session is aerobically (with oxygen) dominant and your improvement will come by moving through the proverbial gears during the session going down and then up the pyramid. As you are running to feel not split and time not set distance you are habituating pace judgement which is much needed pre-requisite whatever your specialist distance.

Join our next NLC Friday Night Track Session on Friday 22nd November – https://www.newlevelscoaching.co.uk/newlevelsrunclub/