Joe Vigil, American distance running coach, designed this track session to help distance runners work on their speed and acceleration.

The following session works on speeding up leg turnover but it also has the added bonus of burning off a lot of kilojoules in a very short time.

Vigil’s Accelerations
For this session, you’ll need to head to the local athletics track or find a flat area where you can mark off 100m, and then every 10m after that up to 200m.

After a warm up, run 100m at roughly 1K race pace. Note your time and recover by walking from the finish point of the 100m to the starting point.

Once you get back to the start, you go for a 110m run at a slightly quicker pace than your original 1K race pace.

The aim is for the 110m run to only take you one second longer than the 100m run. Once again recover by walking back to the start.

Then you would go for a 120m run which should once again be at a slightly faster pace so your time is only one second more than your 110m time. Recover.

Continue to do these short bursts until you have run the whole 200m in one go. This should end up taking 10 seconds longer than your original 100m time.

At the end of this session, make sure to do a cool down jog to try and flush some of the lactic acid out of your legs- you should have quite a burn going by the end of the session!