Training: Speedwork and form drills (NYT)

[4Rails]

Jeff, folks,

Is this sound direction for us enthusiastic, competitive amatuers? I
have no interval work to speak of so far and continue to look at
choices and to understand how it contributes to overall performance.
Are there amatuer track events? Some short and fast race goals would
be a different motivating structure for me.

4
==
NYT, April 17, 2008
FASTER, HIGHER, STRONGER: Changing Speeds to Go the Distance
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

SARA HALL experienced an instructive epiphany in 2006. In the fall,
she’d won the national road-running championship for 5K (3.1 miles), a
distance she specialized in at Stanford. At the time, she considered
herself a 5K runner. So did everyone else.

A few weeks later, everything changed when she won the Fifth Avenue
Mile in New York, a glamour event in American road racing. “Afterward,
I thought, ‘That’s my distance,’ ” she said. “It plays to my
strengths. I loved the fast pace. I’m not a patient runner.”

Today, Hall, 25, is laser-focused on training for the 1,500 meters
(0.93 mile) in hopes of making the United States Olympic team in
middle distance running.

She and her coach, Terrence Mahon, who also coaches Hall’s husband,
Ryan Hall, the winner of the United States Olympic team men’s marathon
trial, have increased her speed work and reconfigured how much she’s
running and her intensity.

“Her work capacity has gone through the roof,” Mahon said, and she can
run greater distances faster than ever before. Which makes her current
regimen a good model for how recreational runners — not just the elite
— can get swifter and sharper, and perhaps even decide that they have
been racing the wrong distance all along.

More > http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/fashion/17fitness.html

And graphic of form drills: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/16/fashion/17fitness.graphic.ready.html