Felix Tanaka — Conditioning & Running Coach

The coach

Base first, then the burn.

The work

Felix ran 4:01 for the mile off a collegiate 1500m program before he ever wrote a session for anyone else — and the way he trains the room comes straight out of that: aerobic base is earned, not hacked. No magic intervals before the engine exists.

His 07:30 conditioning block is the dawn crew's anchor — steady-state work, breathing drills, the unglamorous miles that make everything above them possible. Then Tuesdays and Thursdays the evening intervals open up, and the east-wall lane gets loud.

Give it a season and you will move through three phases, in this order: it felt easy, then it felt impossible, then one morning it felt easy again — faster. That is the whole sport, compressed.

The lane, in five gears

Pace ladder for sixty meters.

Every tier below is written as a split for one length of the east-wall lane, because that is the only number you can actually read while you're running. The recovery column is not filler. Felix programs the rest as tightly as the run — take more and the tier stops working, take less and you have quietly dropped a gear without noticing.

01

Easy — the base

Conversational. The tier that earns every tier under it.

20.0s

5:33 / km · 8:56 / mile

None — 30 to 45 min continuous

The recovery for this tier is the other twenty-three hours. If you need a break inside it, you ran tier 02 by accident.

02

Steady — marathon

Comfortably hard. Short sentences only.

16.5s

4:35 / km · 7:22 / mile

None — capped at 20 min

The cap is the recovery. Felix stops this one while it still feels repeatable, which is the point of it.

03

Tempo — threshold

The edge you can hold. Breathing has a rhythm to it.

14.0s

3:53 / km · 6:15 / mile

60s standing, per 6 min of work

Stand for it — don't sit, don't fold over the rail. Threshold recovery is short on purpose; the incomplete rest is doing the work.

04

Intervals — VO₂

Tuesday and Thursday at 19:30. The loud tier.

11.5s

3:12 / km · 5:08 / mile

1:1 — jog as long as the rep ran

Felix gates the next rep on heart rate, not on the clock: under 130 before you go again, even if that means standing there an extra thirty seconds.

05

Reps — speed

His own mile pace. Six to eight lengths, never more.

9.0s

2:30 / km · 4:01 / mile

3:00 full walk-back — non-negotiable

This is the one members shorten, and shortening it is how tier 05 quietly becomes a worse version of tier 04. Walk the lane back. Take all three minutes.

Paces are the lane's own splits, not a promise — Felix sets your five numbers in the first week of the 07:30 block and rewrites them roughly every eight. Nobody starts on tier 05. Almost nobody needs it.

Train with Felix