With any goal or resolution, apparently telling people about it makes you more accountable to it. Yeah I can buy that. Writing here each week about how much progress I have (or haven't) made towards it should also keep me honest.
Although it appears to take the form of a sort of new year's resolution, running sub-17 is far more than that to me. It's something I actually started to think (obsess?) about and work specifically towards at the tail-end of 2012. However after a promising 17:25 run at Brighton parkrun in Jan, from Feb 2013 onwards moving house and becoming a father inevitably meant running was forced to take a back seat. Pesky babies. Such is life and that's ok of course, but thankfully 2014 is looking much calmer. I've had a really consistent spell of training again since August, pretty much averaging 40 miles per week since then and I've used that time to refine what sessions work for me and to get into running habits that fit with my new life of fatherhood and a long commute... which basically boils down to getting up obscenely early and running then.
My thinking behind specifically trying to improve my 5k time isn't just because a PB that starts with a 16: would be a nice thing to have, although it definitely would be. There is also a bigger picture here that I'm thinking of. If I ever want to get down into the 2:4x range for the marathon I think I need to first of all maximise my speed at the shorter distance. Improving your 5k pace should theoretically disseminate down to improvements in your race pace for all the longer race distances. Very basically, if I can make my 5k pace 5:25 miling rather than 5:35mm, then trying to run 6:20 pace for a much longer distance should feel proportionately easier. I believe that logic will play out, 100%.
One of the big things important to me about this goal is that I tackle it with a training program that I've devised. So much of my running over the past years has been shaped by jumping from one training schedule or marathon build-up to another, copying sessions I've read about, chasing mileage and generally lacking the confidence to stick with any one approach. I'm starting to understand that real progress in distance running comes not from one well-executed training block, but from many weeks, months and even years of consistent running, doing the sessions every week and having that fitness layer-up over time. So the weekly schedule I've settled on now is simple, repeatable, high quality, moderate volume training that I think I can do every week. And I've already been following it loosely since Aug/Sept. I'm looking for my progress to come from the consistency, an accumulation of training, rather than from any single session within it. Consistent with my other delusions of grandeur, I'm calling it The Masterplan - although it is really very basic:
M - Easy Run (6 miles)
T - Treadmill Reps, (600-1600m, total 5km) or 4 mile tempo (alternated each week)
W - Easy Run (6-8 miles)
T - Progressive Tempo Run (9 miles) start steady finish fast
F - REST
S - parkrun
S - Long Run (12-20 miles)
Nothing ground-breaking in there. Easy runs will be kept very easy to allow me to hit Tues and Thurs very hard. Only Tuesday and Saturday are particularly specific to 5km, but I think that is targeted enough. There is a fair amount of aerobic running in there still to start with, in recognition of the fact that much of my early improvement and getting back to the 17:2x area will likely come from that; its no coincidence my current parkrun PB (17:23) came one week before a marathon. But as we get into Spring I expect to introduce more short reps outside (road and/or track) to improve leg speed further.
A final comment for now. The other goal of reaching my 100th parkrun isn't separate from all of this, in fact its very much related to mission 16:xx. Running another 37x parkruns this year will absolutely ensure I give this goal a proper crack. Not all of them will be flat-out efforts, but a lot of them will be. And of course there is the old, but surely very true, adage;
'If you want to get good at something, do it a lot.'
No comments:
Post a Comment