Thomas Crowne wrote:
This has been touched on but I'm kind of surprised it hasn't been stressed. Your first goal is to get under - or at least close to 5 - for a mile. If you can't do that, you can run 100 mpw and/or tempos or run intervals til you're blue in the face and it won't matter. Forget you're a 5k runner for six months. Train for a 5 minute mile. When you can do that, you can probably run a 17:30 then and there; if not, take a couple months to return to 5k training and you're all set.
Interesting...this seems to go along with the previous posts about boosting my speed and makes sense to me. Any suggested workouts and weekly mileage targets?
To add a bit more detail about me, I started running for fitness, entered a local 1/2, got hooked and started to train for a marathon. Since Fall/07, my training has been geared toward that distance...ran my first in 3:32 in May/08. Then the idea of running Boston crept in and that was my goal...qualify in May/09, run Boston April/10. I ran 3:17 in the May/09 race (in 85 degree heat so that didn’t help as I felt I was, at worst, in 3:05 – 3:10 shape based on the 1:26 half I ran 6 weeks earlier) and was ticked off enough to run another in Sept/09 where I ran 3:09. At Boston I ran 3:11.
Anyway, my mileage hasn't been an issue I don't think. I ran something like 3400 miles in '09 and was averaged 75 in the early part of this year.
For a number of reasons, I'm done with the marathon distance for now. I've been focusing on 5k/10K training since May, but have seen no improvement on the 18:55 5K I ran more than a year ago (when my training was marathon-focused) and no improvement on the 19:10 I ran 3 months ago. So, there's my frustration -- I'm now focusing my training on a shorter distance, but can't improve on times that I set while focused on something much longer.
So, back to improving speed...that would kind of turn my training on its head. That is, get fast first, and then worry about endurance and stamina. Is that sort of the general consensus?