What The Heck Is A Tempo Run?

If you’ve ever asked yourself this question while looking at a training plan—or watching an influencer describe a workout, or reading comments on social media—you’re not alone. I want to clear up any confusion about what people mean when they talk about tempo runs, because what folks mean can differ pretty significantly.

“Tempo” is not a technical term, but rather a catch-all for several kinds of workouts that involve running moderately hard: the one thing everyone agrees on is that it broadly means “faster than your usual easy pace” in an intentional and probably structured way. But beyond that, when you hear or read that phrase, your spidey senses should tingle a little and you should try to figure out which one of these things they mean:

1. A structured workout targeting “threshold” pace

Threshold pace, sometimes called lactate threshold or LT2 depending on the source, is a technical term that refers to the intensity at which your body starts to accumulate blood lactate faster than it can clear it. (Note: lactate itself isn’t what causes fatigue but is rather the byproduct of the metabolic processes your body uses to generate energy.) More lactate in the blood means that your body is working harder; threshold is the pace at which you accumulate fatigue faster than you can recover.

Threshold is around zone 4 in a 5-zone model, and it usually lies somewhere between half-marathon and 10K race pace—think about the pace that you could race all-out for an hour. Running at this pace in a structured way improves your body’s ability to work moderately hard for longer periods of time.

Threshold workouts can be continuous or broken up into intervals.

2. A structured workout targeting a specific goal pace, e.g., marathon or half-marathon goal pace

It’s common to hear people say that their training plan involves, for instance, a “tempo run at marathon pace” in the middle of a long run. Because marathon pace is slower than threshold pace, the use of the word “tempo” is more colloquial here and simply means a structured, faster portion of running at a specific pace. This type of run is primarily useful as preparation for a specific race, often near the end of a training block.

Like threshold runs, goal-pace tempo runs can be continuous or broken up into intervals.

3. A less structured workout with the goal of simply getting the heart rate up and working a bit harder than usual

An even more colloquial use of the word “tempo” is fairly common in base-building phases of training plans when the goal is for an athlete to pick up the pace with no specific goal in mind other than to get the heart rate up.

These more informal tempo runs are usually continuous—if they’re broken up into intervals, they’re more likely to be called fartlek runs.