Most of the training plans I write are pretty similar. I set up three harder days each week and the rest of the runs easy to very easy. Some plans only have two harder days per week (or none if it's a plan for a beginner or someone returning from injury), but three is standard for someone looking to run a fast race. Of those three workouts, one is a faster workout done around 5K pace, one is a tempo (sometimes called threshold) workout done around half marathon to 10 mile pace, and one is a long run.
Structuring my week with those three workouts has worked well for me in the past, so I figured on this training plan I'd stick with it.
A key workout this past week was a tempo run. The workout consisted of one mile of easy running followed by 30 minutes at tempo pace and finished off with about two miles of easy running.
The workout went great. I ran the 30 minutes of tempo pace at 6:19 per mile.
While I'm glad I hit my pace, I don't worry as much about pace during a tempo workout. Instead of having a set goal for a set distance like an interval workout, I tend to do my tempo runs more by feel. I like to call tempo runs, "comfortably hard." When I do a tempo run, I'll often not even check my pace until halfway through or so. Instead, I'll run what feels like a pace I could sustain for about an hour. I also use my breathing as a guide and sometimes check in by making sure I can say a couple words strung together but not more or less.
These workouts have been going well for me and that has me feeling good about my goal of breaking 18 minutes in the 5K. I'm also planning on a virtual marathon, and after a couple more weeks of training and seeing how my workouts are going, I'll have some ideas of what I'm capable of in the marathon.
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