How They Train: Frank Lara
By: Michael Mcmillan
Tags: Runner Community, Runners, Runner Profile, Running Training, Running

Photo courtesy of tracksmith.com

Frank Lara is a distance runner who currently runs for the Roots Running Project, a group of post-college elite runners in Boulder, Colorado, and coached by Dr. Richard Hansen. Lara was recently crowned the USTAF 15k champion finishing in 44:44. Later, I will describe the special circumstances with which Lara won this championship.

Lara has personal bests of 13:56.17 for 5k; 27:44.65 for 10k on the track; 28:10 for 10k on the road; and 61:48 for the half-marathon. This half-marathon result was at the January 2020 Chevron Houston Half Marathon, where Lara finished as the 10th American male runner and he was just 14 seconds off top American runner Jared Ward’s time.

Currently, Lara is preparing to be a pacer at The Marathon Project, a marathon race that will be held on Sunday, December 20, 2020, at 8:00 am in Chandler, Arizona. Some of the best marathon runners in the United States are entered in this race, including Scott Fauble, Jared Ward, Scott Smith, Brendan Gregg, and Shadrack Biwott. Entering this race as a pacer indicates that Lara is now thinking about moving up to the marathon distance, which makes sense given his excellent showing at the Chevron Houston half.

I became aware of Lara this past fall when I watched him race in the Michigan Pro Ekiden, where he finished third in the 10k with a time of 29:26. You can follow Lara as he trains and races on Twitter.

Lara ran cross country and track at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory High School in Houston, Texas. He was born in Mexico and moved to Houston when he was five years old.

Lara led the school to four straight district cross country championships, and in his senior year, he won the individual championship. He was named a finalist for the Footlocker Nationals and was a qualifier for the Nike Cross Nationals team. In his senior year, Lara was the Texas Gatorade Boys Cross Country Runner of the Year.

He also had a successful collegiate running career at Furman University from 2014 through 2018. In his freshman year, he was named to the All-Southern Conference first team cross country and to the Southern Conference All-Conference team. He earned all-region honors and again was All-Conference in the Southern Conference.

During his junior year, he was an All-American honorable mention and again was named All-Conference in the Southern Conference. He was also the Southern Conference Runner of the Year after winning the cross country championship.

In Lara’s senior year, he was a second-team All-American in the 10,000 meters and was named to the All-Southern Region team, as well as being all-conference yet again. In the conference indoor championship meet, Lara won the 3,000 and the 5,000-meter runs and finished second in the 5,000 meters at the outdoor track championship.

In each of his college seasons, Lara was named to the conference’s All-Academic team.

How Lara Has Trained

Lara says he was running 70 to 75 miles per week when he first relocated to Boulder, Colorado from Greenville, South Carolina, where he was running while in college. Lara states that this mileage was down from the 85 to 90 miles he had been running in college, but the work feels about the same since Boulder is at altitude. As you’ll read below, he has boosted that volume since he first moved out west.

Lara says it wasn’t a big deal to move to Colorado and to run at altitude because he has been coming to Boulder every summer since he was in high school to participate in summer running camps. In fact, he says that one of the reasons he picked joining the Roots Running Project is because he had been introduced to the team’s coach, Richard Hansen, at the Boulder summer running camps and knew he wanted to run with Coach Hansen.

In college, Lara ran the type of workouts typical of collegiate middle-distance runners. In a typical week, he would do some type of short speed workout, a longer tempo or fartlek workout, and then a long run.

How Lara is Training Now

If you’re interested in seeing how Lara is currently training, you can follow him on Strava. As he is currently training to be a pacer in The Marathon Project race, he has really built up his volume over the past few months. Since June, he is averaging over 200 miles per month and is quickly approaching 300 miles. So far this month, as of December 15, 2020, he has run 99 miles.

This is much more mileage than he ran as a middle-distance runner in college and is indicative of his desire to move up in distance to the marathon. It could also show his desire to run more half marathons both for the races themselves and as training for the marathon.

To look at his daily workouts, for the last four days he has run 6 miles in 45:16, 8 miles in 57:08, 8 miles in 59:06, and 9.9 miles in 1:15:01. These runs are all right around a 7-minute per mile pace, so these have to be considered easy runs as he tapers for The Marathon Project.

The Circumstances of Lara’s 15K Championship

I mentioned at the top of this article that Lara won the 2020 USTAF 15K Championship run in March 2020. It turns out that at the race itself, Lara came in second to Ridouane Harroufi. But later, it came out that Harroufi failed the drug test for this race, and because of that, they declared Lara the champion in October 2020. Asked about this later, Lara had several things to say about running and doping. First, Lara says that doping has to be seen as wrong: “I think the sport along with cycling, has such a long history of doping. It’s a thing that seems OK to people now because, before, everybody did it and if you didn’t do it you were going to be behind. How can we reconstruct the image of the sport so there’s no reason to do it anymore?”

What Lara believes has to happen is there needs to be a change of the culture of doping in running: “I think that the anti-doping agencies are doing everything they can, but a lot of the time the resources that they have just aren’t enough. I think that the best thing for the sport is to make the whole idea of doping horribly, horribly wrong: make it seem like the worst possible thing that somebody could do. It’s too hard to be stopped at the testing level only.”

Finally, Lara thinks every runner needs to recognize how unhealthy doping is: “Another thing that people forget to acknowledge is that (these) banned substances are harmful to the athlete. I think another thing would be education on why this stuff is not good for you, outside of the performance enhancing side of it.”

Thanks for reading and please email me at mmmcmillan1@att.net with your comments and suggestions. You can also respond directly to this article.