Is the point of tempo work that you need to do light overdistance work of some kind, or is it that you need to do light work of longer than 100m, which happens to be overdistance work if your event is the 100m? And if your event is much longer than 100m, does non-tempo training make tempo work redundant?
Basically, as you move from 100m toward 800m or so for an event, does the tempo distance increase, stay the same, or get eliminated?
I am sure this has been discussed on here somewhere, and I have both books and one of the DVDs, but if someone could help me out I would appreciate it. If I get fired from my job because I spend too much time hunting things like this down, I am going to have bigger problems than how much tempo work to do.
For a short distance sprinter 100-200m It would be 2000-2200m / session (aerobic contribution is around 1-5%) easy day contribution + increasing recovery rate
For a 400m sprinter It can be increased to up to 3000m / session (aerobic contribution are around 18% (Bompa, 1983)) easy day contribution + increasing recovery rate
When you go farther than that (500-800m) tempo can simply mean easy days rather than conditioning day…they loose some importance in my way of thinking since the aerobic is much more (aerobic contribution are around 50% for a 800m (Bompa, 1983)) easy day contribution + increasing recovery rate, but the conditioning effect here is much higher in actually intense training days
The point with tempo, is not to get to the point where you are working on over-distance to build a speed reserve like a 300m runner running fast 320-350m. The point is to get conditioning/easy day. When you are working on tempo YOU SHOULD FEEL NO LACTATE BUILDUP !!!
The drill distance can vary from under- to equal to over-distance for a 100-m runner. Get the needed effect out of it by a variety of means. Stick to the ‘tempo rules’ and get creative.