schedule example for low 5:xx 1mi women?

I think you have the right idea. More miles at this point & the improvements will keep coming. Repeating the Pfitz 5k plan will allow you to race a good mile/3k. You could swap out some workouts if you want/need more speed.

I don't think you need to overthink it at this point. 4 workouts every 2 weeks- 2 at the distance you're focusing on, 1 faster (speed), 1 tempo (strength). Weekly medium long runs & long runs (can alternate doing your tempo here at marathon effort). Tweak when you're getting close to a goal race.

Thanks! Think the goal times I've listed are within spitting distance given another ~12 week block?

You have set great goals for yourself and with patience you can run well. I work with a wide range of females that range in age from 10-50 in my training group. I specialise primarily in middle distance with several of my junior females winning national medals over 1500 and 3k.

First of all 18:53 is good running on the track and i would say that you probably are close to 11 minutes for 3k at the moment.

Here is what a sample week looks like for us in a preparation phase.

Monday easy running 6-8k

Tuesday track session 3x3x400 at 3k pace on 2:15 cycle 2 minutes between sets + 4x150 accelerations (every 50m change gears last 50m at 90-95% max speed long recovery) or 3x4x200 at slightly faster than 1500m pace 75 second cycle with 2 minutes between sets.

Wednesday 8-10k easy

Thursday grass session 2x2k threshold with 1 min rest + 5x100m at 1500m pace with 100m walk recovery

Friday off

Saturday (we alternate these sessions) 5x1k on 5:15 cycle (5k-3k pace) 5x100 or Lactate tolerance session of 300m hills on 3:30.

Sunday 60-75 minutes easy running

My junior females would do less than this but for your age and experience this would allow you to run pretty well depending on your talent. If you are pressed for time you can even take Monday off. Threshold running with 3k efforts and shorter faster efforts over 100m and 150m will have you ready to run well. We do hills throughout the year and our toughest session is the 6-8x300m hill lactate tolerance session. This is not something I give younger juniors for sure.

Good luck and hopefully you achieve your goals.

Thank you, this is super helpful! Am I correct in thinking when you refer to cycles, it's starting the next rep every 2:15s, 75s etc? So you'd run an ~85 and have 50s recoveries?

For the hill sessions, are you running those by effort? A common workout I've done in training here is 3 x 4x60s, where first set is 5k effort, second 3k, final 1600m with the recoveries being a jog back down.

Yes we use cycle's instead of say designated rest but as the season gets closer to big races we shorten so we may start off the season doing 400's at 3k pace on 2:30 cycle but later on maybe 2 minutes.

I also didn't mention that most of our running is on soft surfaces such as grass and dirt as we are lucky here in Australia. We only run 1x per week on the track.

The 60s hills you do are great. When we do the lactate tolerance session we keep the number rather low and we are lucky here as we have a hill that wraps around like a giant U. These are done at 1500m pace and are extremely painful but helps athletes run well over 800/1500m but we do this session only 2-3 x per season.

This morning we are doing 8-10x 200m hills with jog back recovery.

The training is similar for females and males that I coach and we did have a 14 year old run 10:06 and my top female run 9:12 earlier this year. We are very excited that races are now back on in November as we have just come out of Covid lockdown.

Good luck in your races and if you want you can check us out on Insta we are under TRI Running Group!

Cheers