Drop 20 seconds in a month?

I am no expert and much slower than you, but I’ve found that even people who run high milage over the summer tend to have their first race be 30s slower than their second race. It’s called a rustbuster, so you might be fine if you just continue training that way.

If you have normal training plan, at your level, every week time should drop 3-6 seconds, so per month-20-30 seconds automatically. Per 2 months 50-60 seconds. But you must have good aerobic base before already built.

Canefis wrote:

If you have normal training plan, at your level, every week time should drop 3-6 seconds, so per month-20-30 seconds automatically. Per 2 months 50-60 seconds. But you must have good aerobic base before already built.

That's not how it works at all.

16:30 seems like a good time for a start of a season. I'd assume once the season actually starts you'll be running harder with your team and the coach will have you doing more VO2 max interval type workout. Why the hurry to drop 20 seconds now? You don't want to peak to soon and be flat at the end of the year.

helpmytime wrote:

Ran a 5k time trail on my local CC course a couple days ago, I ran 1630. I have about a month until the start of our season so I wondered what I need to do to be able to drop 20 seconds off of my time to reach low 1610’s. I am currently running 2 up weeks of 55-60 miles followed with a down week of around 40-45. I’m thinking of upping my workouts to 2 workouts a week including some speed workouts and including interval workouts. Any suggestions of what paces I should be running or what types of workouts I should be doing? Thanks

Talk with your coach about the plan to get you faster.

Asking a lot of random people on the internet who have no idea about your training history is going to yield you many opinions and probably contradictory ones.

You need to run a real race against real competition that can run 16:10. You'll hang.