Say your typical lazy 20year old college guy, who's only activity in life is to walk from and to classes totaling one to two miles a day starts the following program:
Monday 40-60min long tempo
Wednesday 10*400m at mile pace
Friday 20min tempo at lactate threshold pace
What could this guy - assuming he has at least a bit of good talent - achieve in the mile and 5k until he hits a plateau?
19 min 5k
5:00 mile
did 3 workouts a week with no other running. 30 min LT, 12x400 and 10x60 second hill sprints. got me to 17:28
after that i started running 70-90 mile weeks and 10 months later I ran 15:38
you can get quite good at running without doing much, but if you want to get better than "quite good" you gotta invest the time.
Lazycollegeguy wrote:
Say your typical lazy 20year old college guy, who's only activity in life is to walk from and to classes totaling one to two miles a day starts the following program:
Monday 40-60min long tempo
Wednesday 10*400m at mile pace
Friday 20min tempo at lactate threshold pace
What could this guy - assuming he has at least a bit of good talent - achieve in the mile and 5k until he hits a plateau?
1) How does this person know what their "mile pace" is?
2) Starting from nothing and doing a 40-60 minute tempo brings two things to mind - a) almost no non-runner would go out and run 40 minutes let alone 60 minutes right away; for those of us who are runners, this seems easy, but for someone who is untrained, it takes a while to build up to that, both mentally and physically. I know a prolific marathon runner who had to run every day for 3 weeks before he could run a mile without stopping when he first started. b) Injury waiting to happen.
So, basically I say this is wrought with failure.
Then let's say he builds up to where he is able to do a continuous 60min run, then tests his mile time, then starts this program. How fast could he get?
This needs more data input. Most importantly, speed/PRs for 400 and 1600, not to mention height, weight, and background with running (no high school running vs. moderate mileage program in high school, or a higher mileage background). It all adds up.
Let's assume a decent athlete with a year or two of high school track, but not XC. Currently able to run sub 60 400 off the couch and close to or sub 5 for the mile, on pure hate and promise of free beer.
Using the schedule above (which is kind of absurd), assuming 20-25 miles a week
2 weeks - 18:00
4 weeks - 17:30
6 weeks - 17:20
And they would not improve a whole lot beyond that, without some additional training. Maybe down to 17:00 or a little under, after several months, assuming that they can also run 4:40s or under for the mile.
caveat the above, the runner described above has decent talent.
A more talented runner (say sub 55 400 with little or no training and sub 2 800 in high school) might do a fair amount better and run low or sub 16s for the 5K.