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Training for under 40mins in the Eastleigh 10k
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Why do you reckon that then?
No egg and chips for us.... my mum says chip-pans are the biggest causes of kitchen fire!
Roast chicken usually. And I like to think a bit outside the box and have some Yorkshire's with it.
I usually stick three on.
I was well 'appy.
"Is there an intensity threshold below which improvements will not occur? If you run 40 miles per week at 8:00 pace and you are quite fit (fit enough that 8:00 pace is about 55% of your max VO2), will running 60 miles per week improve your performance, automatically? Just because you increase your mileage, it doesn't mean you will become more fit if the intensity is below your personal fitness threshold (let us say 60-65% of max vO2).
Now, pay attention, because the following is tricky. Let us say that you increase your mileage to 90 miles per week, instead of just to 60 miles per week from your original 40 miles per week. Let us say also that you run the same easy pace that is about 55% of aerobic capacity. Based on the statements that no improvement occured when you increased your easy running mileage from 40 to 60 per week, we might therefore assume that increasing from 40 to 90 at an easy pace would create the same dismal result; no improvement. Ha! Now, I've got you!
Somewhere around 70-75 miles per week you started getting really tired and depleted in your muscle fibers that usually generate all the force for running at 8:00 pace. So, what now? You stimulate your body to use newer fibers to create force and they improve their fitness, which was never challenged before. As Peter Snell has said often, you stimulate fast oxidative fibers to contribute to the power output because the slower ones become exhausted as mileage rises high. So, in essence, you work on those fibers that are normally not called into play until you run at a pace about one minute per mile slower than 5k pace (we call this the Aerobic Threshold pace). In other words you end up stimulating your faster fibers to become better at using aerobic processes when your slow twitch, endurance fibers get tired and fall by the wayside at generating force to keep on chugging along at 8:00 pace.
Do you see now that when you run slowly, you have to run a lot of miles to fatigue fibers? This will result in improved aerobic performance and result in improved racing peformance.
Now, if we go back to 40 miles per week, but run it at 7:00 pace, which for this example is 70% of max VO2, well above the minimum stimulus threshold previously mentioned, we experience a different situation if we increse mileage from 40 to 60 per week. Instead of having no improvement in performance, we have a 30 second per mile increase in peformance, if we do this long enough to adjust to the new workload. This scenario is what happens to a lot of high school kids who run 18 minutes for a 5km race on 40 miles per week of training, then improve to 16:30 when they up their mileage to 60 per week. They had sufficient stimulus all along (they were 5-10% above the minimum threshold while running at an average of 70% of max VO2)."
Some of you might observe that given my race times, 8:30 seems incredibly slow.
BUT.. for my VO2max (calculated at 56ml/kg/min), a 70%VO2max workload represents a theoretical 81% MHR. My max HR as tested is 200, so 81% is 162bpm.
This morning on the treadmill I ran at 7.1mph for 5 miles (8:27/mile pace). I checked my HR every mile. All four of the times I checked my HR it was 165-169. It never strayed outside of those limits.
So, assuming my figures to be correct, despite the fact i'm running at a slow pace, i'm still running at least as hard as 70%VO2max? And by virtue of that, running at a pace significant enough to yield improvements - "the minimum stimulus threshold".
On top of that, 8:30 a mile pace is easy enough that i've been able to chuck additional mileage on each week without it being a particular strain. In line with this, I don't see any reason not to keep bumping my mileage up to at least 70mpw? I still have almost 7 weeks till my target event.
Thoughts anyone?
I think its down to the individual who is training. Ive had a few mates who are Personal Trainers and have all types of qualifications in fitness and sport who dont agree. Ive been told to run less mile but at quick race pace and also told to run much slower for most of my runs but over longer distances. Both had what seemed like valid reasons as to why I should do this.
I am trying to find a happy medium between the 2. Im currently running around 35 miles a week moving upto towards 40 ahead of my first half marathon.
5 x 2000m? 7 x 1500m?
Hi Paul et al.
I too am trying to hit sub 40 for the first time (current pb 41:33). My tempo runs are going great but I am having trouble stabilising my interval sessions. I have a local track that I use and today was supposed to do 5 x 1600m with 400m intervals. My first 1600 was 6:26 which I did without looking at my garmin and felt comfortable so tried the next one at the same pace only to come in at 6:40!
Slightly crest-fallen I pegged the next one at 6:08 and did the fourth at 6:20 and was completely fatgiued and didnt manage a fifth so came away feeling like it wasnt a successful session.
This has happened several times now and I was wondering if anyones got any tips for pacing myself right on intervals. Or is it just experience thats needed?
I'll go with 10 x 1K I think... aim for 4 minutes with 90sec rest. I make that out as being 9.3mph. I appreciate that I shouldn't be killing myself, as these are meant to be strong aerobic efforts and not time trials.
What sort of warmup/warmdown should I be looking at? Couple of miles each side? Or less?
As far as pacing intervals goes, you need to glance at your garmin every 50m and check you're on target! If you aren't, slow down or speed up!
1 mile warmup in 8:30
5 x 1000m @ 10.2mph - all done in 3'40" (18'20" for the accumulated 5k)
1 mile warmdown in 8:30
5 x mile @5k pace with about 2 minutes recovery is a fairly staple session. It's a hard one no question but certainly do-able. In general 8k worth of work at 5k pace with roughly 50% of rep time as recovery is a good VO2 max session though admittedly a peaking workout.
That said if your 10k pace is over 6 minutes/mile you need to be looking at doing slightly short reps if you're working at close to 5k pace- 5 minutes ideally at the max.
Paul- what's the recovery you were taking on these kms? Looks like a very reasonable session regardless.