On the 29th May I ran a 5K PB of 17:51. Yesterday I did a parkrun of 17:56 so 6 days after my PB. For the last 6 months or so I’ve been hard parkrun efforts nearly every week. I assume it gets to a point where these all out efforts can become counter-productive and I’ll just plateau. Would I get more bang for my buck maybe just doing a hard effort once every 3/4 weeks and using the Saturday morning to get some mileage or intervals in instead?
Yes ... but you already knew that.
Not really because in the last year I’ve gone from a 18:59 to 17:51 so over a minute of progress.
RyanM42 wrote:
Not really because in the last year I’ve gone from a 18:59 to 17:51 so over a minute of progress.
Yes but as with most things it’s a case of diminishing returns after some initial big leaps in performance. Given you have more or less plateaued now you would be better off going into a block of training for 2-3 months, focusing on strength such as tempos/thresholds and bumping up your overall mileage and then do another 5km race where you will almost certainly see a big drop in your time again.
Thanks man! I appreciate you actually providing some insight instead of just spouting nonsense! I’ll take this onboard
If you like the routine of the parkrun, keep it on some off weeks, as part of your workout plan. 3 miles easy, TEMPO parkrun-maybe around 19:30. 3 miles easy again. That's a nice 9 mile day.... of course maybe you need to be higher or lower than that.