Hello everyone,
A brief intro about me, I was a former heavy smoker from the age of 18 until the age of 26-27 roughly. I have never run in high school, I was just playing sports with the other kids regularly. At 25 I started going to the gym, since I was overweight, hiking up some mountains (now my long-term ambition is to become a decent alpinist) and tried to be active. I lost some kilos but then I regained them. The nature of my job did not help in terms of consistency (I am an academic, sometimes I have to work for 15-18 consecutive hours in front of a computer). Last year I changed completely my lifestyle starting from 106kg (190cm height age 30 now). In the beginning, I could not run even for 200m without stopping, running 5k in a row was just a dream. After a month or so, I could finish a 5k in 32 minutes. I increased the mileage to about 15 per week and I went down to 25 minutes 5k by last August and by lowering my weight to 95 kg. After that I took it a bit more serious, I did about 8 weeks to 40-45km of structured running following some advice from threads in the running LRC forum and I managed to run my first 10k race, and my first race in general, in about 45 minutes (was a hilly course with 200m elevation). Last December my weight was about 88kg (same as now) and I participated in 8.76km race finishing in 36:30 splitting the first 5k in 19:40 (100m elevation over the 9k). From that point and on I decreased my mileage to about 20-30km per week (running 6 days per week). That was because I am skiing in a weekly manner during winter (either in a ski center or ski touring). In the last 5 weeks I increased again my mileage to about 60-70 km a week following the 5-10k plan from Jack Daniels (+4 home strength training days per week) formula and I feel in the best shape of my life. I did not try to race a 5k or so, but yesterday I finished an easy 10k run with 4;40/km pace with 150bpm (200 is my max). I think that if I go out and try to race a 5k I am sure in 19:00 minute shape. I really like running and I am planning to commit to it. I would really like to explore my potential (even my 30s potential and not my 20s one) and I would love to include some training tips from the people here to my daily training schedule. Thus, please feel free to give me some advice. What should I expect in terms of time improvement with structured training in a time window of 4-5 years? My bmi now is around 24-24.3.