I don’t know if it’s all in my head, but I swear threshold feels easier on the track. Running 5:20 pace on the bike path might as well be a sprint, but, if I’m on the track, all of a sudden I have to hold back from going faster. The track has some sort of mythical power that makes running anything slower than 5k pace feel like a jog. I don’t understand it, but I appreciate it and will attempt to articulate it.
In high school, the track was a place for speedwork. I don’t know if this was unique to me or a universal experience, but I basically trained like an 800 runner all of high school (even though my best event was the 2 mile). As a result, most of my work on the track was mile pace or faster. In college, that leveled out a bit, as we did some threshold work on the track along with 10k, 5k, 3k, and mile pace sessions. However, I always associated track workouts as being fast days, because they were almost always the highest intensity session of the week. Now, as a professional runner, I still hold that association. I think that the mental link between “track” and “fast” that I forged over the years makes threshold feel easier. Since my body expects a difficult, fast, high intensity workout, the feeling of comfortably hard is always easier than what it anticipated.
I truly don’t know if there’s any scientific backing to this theory, but I swear it’s true for me. Watch this video to see how my track threshold workout went.
