Your guide to holding a faster pace for longer—and hitting all your running goals.
Let’s travel back to the Paris Olympics—the women’s marathon event in particular. Twenty kilometers into the race, Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands was holding her pace and biding her time. “The moment I started to feel good at 20K, I felt so good. Then I knew I wanted gold,” Hassan said, moments after the race. “But everybody else was fresh and all I was thinking was, ‘When are they going to break? They’re going to go hard, they’re going to go hard.’”
Hassan held strong until the very end, when she made a final sprint for the finish. (Oh, and that was after winning a bronze medal in the women’s 10,000 and 5,000 meters.)
Arguably more critical than that final push was her ability to hold her pace over the first 41 kilometres—a concept known as speed endurance. “She’s always in it through the end, no matter what distance she’s running,” says Alison Marie Helms, Ph.D., C.P.T., a certified running coach. “It’s kind of insane to be able to do that for a marathon and for a middle-distance race.”
Ben Delaney, head of training at New York Road Runners, the nonprofit that produces 60 annual adult and youth races including the New York City Marathon, agrees that Hassan is a great example of speed endurance, adding Cole Hocker, gold medalist in the 1500, and Yared Nuguse, indoor mile world record holder, to the list as well.
Luckily, you don’t have to be a professional athlete to benefit from speed endurance as it’s highly trainable, Helms says. Keep reading for everything to know about this important component of running, plus how to work on it.
The Definition of Speed Endurance
“Speed endurance is essentially the ability to maintain speed over a given time or distance,” Helms says. “The term speed endurance comes from track sprinting terminology, but the way I think about it is more general, especially working with endurance runners.”
Delaney agrees that there’s a misconception that speed endurance is a sprinter thing: “There is still a benefit to speed endurance training for longer distance runners since speed and endurance are relative to both the distance and athlete,” he says.
Other than helping you perform late in the race so you don’t burn out, speed endurance can improve your overall fitness and VO2 max, which can, in turn, improve your running economy, Helms says. That can lead to increased running speed, better endurance, and improved leg strength and running form and mechanics, which will hopefully result in better race performance, Delaney adds.
Mentally, training for speed endurance “prepares you to push through and run at those speeds when you’re tired,” Helms says, allowing you to hold your pace throughout a race rather than “gassing out” at the end.
8 Strategies for Building Speed Endurance
Ready to push your pace for longer? Follow these expert running, cross-training, and lifestyle tips to do just that.
1. Maintain a Strong Aerobic Base
“Speed endurance requires having a strong aerobic base,” Helms says. That means doing an 80/20 training split—perform 80 percent of your workouts at a lower intensity, while using the remaining 20 percent to focus on high-intensity efforts like intervals or tempo runs. (More on this soon!)
If you’re running 32 kilometres a week, that might mean 25 of those are easy-paced and 6 involve speedwork. That might break down into two five-mile easy runs, one 8 kilometres run with 3 kilometres of tempo mixed in, and one three-mile dedicated speed workout.
2. Choose Speed Workouts, Based on Your Goal Race
Most runners will be doing one to two speed endurance running workouts a week when race training, but what you do will vary based on what you’re training for. “Keep in mind that more is not better,” Delaney underscores. “You want to make sure these workouts are structured (that means doing a warmup, then hard efforts, followed by recovery efforts or sustained moderate efforts, ending with a cooldown) and avoid doing them on back-to-back days.”
Helms also notes that it’s important to ease into these types of workouts, starting with, say, two repeats before working your way to more.
“If you’re a sprinter who wants to work on short, quick, intense bursts of speed, then 200- to 400-meter repeats at 90 to 95 percent of max speed are great,” Delaney says. This “will help improve leg turnover and form, while building aerobic and anaerobic capabilities when sustaining high intensity.”
If you’re trying to build your speed endurance for a 5K, you might lengthen those repeats to 400- or 800-meters at mile pace (which is about your VO2 max) or slightly faster, Helms says. “Doing your repeats around that [pace] is really the most bang for your buck in terms of potential for improved VO2 max and oxygen uptake for that speed endurance,” Helms says. “VO2 max is part of speed endurance in that it improves your ability to deliver oxygen to your muscles and sustain speeds for longer times.”
“If you’re trying to improve your speed endurance for something like a marathon or a half marathon, you might do 1,000-meter or one-mile repeats at your race pace or slightly faster,” Helms says.
She also likes “Yasso 800s” for marathon and half-marathon speed endurance prep. “By training near, at, or slightly faster than race pace for periods of time during a workout, the body adapts to the stress to ultimately increase running efficiency and economy,” Delaney adds.
“For most runners, it will take about four to six weeks of consistent speedwork to start seeing results after adding one to two speed workouts to your weekly schedule,” Delaney adds.
3. Build Strength Endurance
To build speed endurance, you need to have strength, and you need to be able to sustain that strength, which is strength endurance, says Kelvin Gary, C.P.T., CEO and head coach at Body Space Fitness in New York City.
That starts with building a base of stability and motor control, which means using lighter weights for higher reps (12 to 20). After focusing on that for a few weeks, switch to strength endurance which means lifting weights that allow you to do eight to 12 reps with good form. (If you can’t do eight, you’re going too heavy; if you can do more than 12, it’s too light.) Gary says you should also work in some hypertrophy (muscle growth) phases, which involves heavier weights and fewer reps (say four to six) in the off season, especially if your muscle mass is below average.
Most runners should be lifting between two and four days per week, and you can cycle between four to six weeks of strength/hypertrophy-focused training and four to six weeks of muscular endurance.
“When you go out and run, that [strength endurance] gets applied and can become speed endurance, you are able to perform at a higher level for a longer period of time,” Gary says.
4. Get Your Muscles to Work Together
In terms of what exercises, you should be doing, Gary likes runners to focus on compound movements that work the upper and lower body together: “Your core and your upper body are just as much a part of your propulsion system, as I like to call it, as your legs,” he says.
Examples of moves include a reverse lunge with a single-arm cable row and a step-up with a single-arm dumbbell press. Bigger lifts like deadlifts are also great because “you’re transferring force from the ground to your hips through your core to your arms to your hands,” Gary says.
Delaney agrees that runners need to think about the body holistically: “Working on your entire body, including your upper body, lower body, back, mid-section, and stabilizing muscles, will build up the body to sustain the workload and increased stress that we add during [running] and training,” Delaney says.
5. Power Up
Plyometrics help with power generation, which is important for speed endurance, says Helms, and adding them in just once a week is a good place to start.
“The main thing I think about when it comes to endurance of any sort, whether it be strength endurance or speed endurance, is power,” Gary agrees. “Power is how fast you can apply the strength that you have, and how long you can maintain that level of strength.”
Indeed, a systematic review published in Sports Medicine in 2024 found that combining strength training with high loads and plyometric training may improve running economy for both middle and long-distance runners. And plyometric training in particular might be most effective for those running at speeds around 7.5 mph (8 minutes per mile) or slower.
To work on power, you’ll want moves like box jumps, medicine ball slams, and kettlebell swings. “You can also do kettlebell variations like single-arm offset swings, where you raise your right heel off the ground and swing with just your right arm which makes your left leg work harder and boosts coordination—also important for speed endurance—and better engages the core due to the anti-rotation component,” Gary says.
6. Train to Move Better
Gary sees a lot of clients who want to run faster, but when he puts them through a movement screen, he notices things like knees that cave in when they squat, tight hip flexors, and sleepy glutes. Fixing these things is a way to “unlock performance that has nothing to do with running and lifting,” he says.
At Gary’s gym, they use a platform called the Kinotek which uses a 3D camera to identify which muscles are working during certain movements. This helps Gary determine if they have any muscular imbalances. But an old school functional movement screen you can get at many gyms can also be beneficial, he says.
For some clients, he’ll suggest pausing running for two weeks until they can address any issues. “People look at me like I’ve lost my mind,” he says. “But sure enough, [they] spend a couple weeks doing a lot of mobility, a lot of activation, getting a lot of balance back, and they go out and run [and they’re like] ‘I ran faster than I have in a long time and I was not tired,’” he says.
Regardless of individual muscular imbalances, Gary recommends that every runner foam roll and work on mobility regularly. “You want to make sure that there’s balanced tone between your quads, your hip flexors, and your glutes to make sure that you are not running ‘with the parking brake on,’” he says. “That in itself can [help with] speed endurance.”
7. Mind Your Nutrition
The speed sessions outlined earlier are more carb-dominant in terms of your energy needs, Helms says. “Making sure that you’re fueling with good carbs is always important for runners, but I think it will directly impact your ability to execute these workouts,” she says. “You need those carbs for fuel to even do them.”
The same is true for race day, as being able to maintain your pace throughout an event like a half or full marathon, in particular, requires fuel. “With marathon training specifically, fueling plays a giant role in this idea of not gassing out in the end,” says Helms.
Delaney adds that a generally well-rounded diet and a focus on hydration are also key. “What we put in—effort, time, energy, food—is what we get out,” he says.
8. Take Recovery Seriously
“The two most important things are to be patient and consistent when you start and don’t add too much to your workout routine,” Delaney says. “Your body will still make gains on easy days and your days off, so your training doesn’t need to be all out, all the time. It’s okay to take time off, swap that hard run for an easy run, or move things in your training schedule around.”
You don’t improve your speed endurance in one workout. It takes weeks and months of training and recovering well so you can push your limits.
