Lactate threshold workouts are one of the most important parts of a distance-running training plan. Putting your body through this type of exercise will help you run faster and run farther. Working to improve your lactate threshold makes more difficult paces feel less exhausting, and therefore, makes you a more efficient and faster runner.
Alex Morrow, RRCA- and USATF-certified run coach and founder of Resolute Running in Birmingham, Alabama, likens the human body and its ability to flush out waste created while training at lactate threshold to a bucket with a hole in the bottom. When you pass that lactate threshold—you put too much waste in the bucket—it overflows and you slow down. Lactate threshold training creates a bigger bucket and a bigger hole at the bottom of that bucket.” By building up your body’s speed endurance, you also boost your self-confidence as you maintain your pace during these tough workouts, and gradually go farther and farther while holding the pace.
Ng says that experiencing this dose of self-confidence during a threshold workout will give you the reassurance that, come race day, you’ll be able to go out there and crush your goal speed. Need more convincing to add these to your schedule? Your lactate threshold is the exercise intensity level at which lactate—a byproduct of exercise that forms when creating energy from glucose, especially without sufficient oxygen—accumulates in the blood faster than you can remove it.
At its core, it’s the line between low- and high-intensity exercise. To find your lactate threshold pace, you could head to a lab. But for a more budget-friendly option, you can calculate this pace using a practical field test.
Following a warmup, you’ll run at your best possible intensity for 30 minutes and use your average running speed during that effort to calculate your ideal threshold pace. Generally speaking, runners find their lactate threshold pace to be about a 7 or 8 out of 10 effort on a rate of perceived exertion (RPE) scale, an effort broadly described as comfortably hard. The coaches we spoke with also describe this effort as one you can sustain for one hour, but not longer.
The key is going at an effort you can sustain—it’s not all out. Ng describes the term tempo run as an overarching umbrella when discussing workouts designed for specific paces. Under the umbrella, you can also run [tempo runs] at marathon pace or maybe half marathon pace.” To add threshold workouts to your training, we asked experts for their favorites.
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