h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The second jog/run session of the week went quite well.

Previously I’ve been working on bettering my parkrun personal best time by working on being able to sustain my running speed for the full length of the 5k. Up till now the first and second miles are run at a fairly even pace, but my speed during the third mile, for one reason or another, usually fades. In the case of the Richmond event this is not entirely surprising as that’s the bit that has the hills. Those hills usually amount to an extra 40 seconds or so on the last mile time. On the other hand the Bushy Park course is as flat as it is possible to be and I usually run the first two at an even pace but a bit too hard, so that fading in the last part adds up to about an extra 10 seconds on the last mile.

Over the last three weeks I’ve been running half mile intervals on my recreation ground course. The times for the individual efforts have improved by about fifteen seconds and I’m able to sustain that over a total of six reps making the full distance of the run. But I’m still nowhere near getting to the sort of sustained pace I need to beat my target time of 23 minutes.

There’s a truism that says: ‘if you want to run fast, you’ve got to run fast’. With that in mind I’ve started on shorter/faster interval distances. It’s going to be a mixture of long and short efforts over the coming weeks. This morning’s session consisted of two 0.5 mile intervals, followed by four 0.25 mile efforts which averaged out at 1:45 each. I need to work up the pace from there while maintaining the longer efforts for a distance of four to five miles.

I won’t be able to make the parkrun tomorrow but I have a 5 mile cross country race on Sunday morning instead. That should provide a good pace workout over the extended distance. In another week the parkrun at Bushy has pacemakers on the odd times. I won’t be ready to have a realistic go at 23 minutes by then, but it could give a good indication of how much work I’ve yet got to do.