Most people who run for fitness and fun are not really like track athletes or long distance pro's. I would class myself as a serious runner, as I run 3 or 4 times a week and now do some other training to try to improve my balance and how my body copes with the longer distances. I even blog about it!
But 'serious' runners, those who join a club with "Athletics" in the name, will tend to stick to no more than 2 distances and specialise in them, with long distance track athletes just entering 5,000m and 10,000m. That's fair enough - if you are going to get really good at something you will probably have to focus on a specific distance. Doing anything like most of us Joggers, who will enter anything from 5k to a marathon or more, would be crazy for a track athlete, but crazy is what we do and love. I have competed in and proudly posted PB times on Fetcheveryone for anything from 100m to 31miles.
So after completing Milton Keynes Marathon in record time (though not sub 4hr unfortunately) I decided to concentrate my efforts over the summer on shorter races - mostly 5k and 10k and the club handicap which is 4 hilly miles. Target races were a few Frimley Lodge parkruns run without a child in tow, two of the Yateley 10k series and 2 or 3 of Sandhurst Joggers' club handicap which takes place on the second Wednesday of the month throughout the year.
For training advice I asked Commonwealth gold medallist and 5000m world record holder Paula Fudge. She runs at my local parkrun and she suggested adding some speed sessions into my weekly routine. With the mantra "If you want to race fast, you need to train fast" in mind my weekly plan over the summer months looked like this:
Long run: about 7 or 8 miles steady
2 speed sessions
parkrun
Whether I got to run a fast parkrun depended on if my daughter let me, if I was racing on Sunday or was too tired from racing mid-week.
The speed sessions could take a variety of forms based on a theme of running short fast intervals like this:
12 x 200m run as 3 sets of 4 x 200m with 30secs between sprints and 1 minute between sets.
12 x 300m run as 3 sets of 4 x 300m with 1min between sprints and 90secs between sets.
12 x 100m hill sprints running fast downhill as well to improve leg speed.
I also did some interval sessions with Sandhurst Joggers which consisted of:
Pyramid intervals of 2 x 4min, 2 x 3min, 2 x 2min and 2 x 1min aiming to keep a consistent quick pace throughout.
12 x 400m done in sets of 2 with 30secs between intervals and 1min rest between sets.
In each of these runs there is a 5min jog to warm up and then warm down and the aim is to run at a fast pace, but not flat out, so you can maintain that same fast pace for every effort. For me that meant doing all the 200m sprints in 40-42secs each.
I did the 200m intervals and hill sprints close to home as we live on a hill with a cul-de-sac at the top which is 100m long and nice and flat. Other interval sessions were done in local parks which had nice flat smooth grassy surfaces which are much kinder to the joints and tendons when running at fast pace - remember you have higher impact forces when you run fast. Also remember that I make sure I stretch after every run, do a bit of foam rolling and had a couple of sports massages over the summer with Abby Fudge at R and R Osteopathy (The Fudge family turn out to be a 1-stop-shop for training and conditioning for me).
So did it work?
Before the summer my PBs for 5k, 10k and 4mile handicap run were:
5k at Frimley Lodge parkrun: 21:42
10k at Julian Farrell, Camberley: 47:38
4mile handicap: 30:45
By the middle of August after about 6 weeks of summer training the stats looked like this:
5k at Frimley Lodge parkrun: 21:18
10k at Yateley 10k races 2 and 3: 46:06, then 44:49
4mile handicap: 29:38
I would call that a resounding JOB WELL DONE!
I think that there's more in the tank and with a bit more of this focussed training I should be able to take another decent chunk of time off those results, but that will have to wait for November as I have 2 more marathons to do in between - the Farnham Pilgrim and Abingdon.
