Glad you’re interested in the workouts, Marcia! The goal behind these paces is to make it so the workouts are usable by people of widely varying speeds. My T pace probably wouldn’t be the same as your T pace, but the workout would work for either of us.
E = Easy (your normal easy pace, at which you can maintain a conversation)
M = Marathon (your marathon race pace)
T = Threshold or Tempo (think of it as your 10K race pace)
I = Interval (think of it as your 5K race pace)
R = Repetition (think of it as your 1-mile race pace)
For more details, look at the bottom of the message in the Resources section. I’d encourage you to read the first and last items:
- Introduction: Background and advice, particularly for those not running 20-25 miles per week
- Pace Calculator: Jack Daniels VDOT Running Calculator
It’s a little harder to calculate these paces given that few of us have raced in the past few months, but try to take as recent and reasonable a race time as you can when using the pace calculator.
And of course, feel free to ask here if you still have questions. My experience from the MITHACAL MILERS workouts is that if one person has a question, other people actually have it too, but are being too shy to ask.