Following the sub-40 10K program

[pabstars]

Hi TheEd,

Yesterday, I did the 5*2K and the results were fine:

8.14, 8.08, 8.06, 8.03 and 8.00 (recovery of 90s)

As you can see from the above the pace got faster and faster which I find great.

I'm trying to do all of the runs in the program but the days are a bit upside-down, so tonight I'll snatch the 1.5 hour run. I know that it would be even better to follow the program exactly as prescribed as the long run is also a quality session like the above nasty interval and in general you should have some days between these runs. However, being such an old runner, it isn't a problem to do a relatively long run tonight! If we don't get crazy snow-storm weather, I expect that about all runs will be followed in the 19-day cycle (maybe one short run will be missed). When the Spring approaches, the 5*2K will all be run in less than 8 minutes :taped:

Cheers,
Paul

[TheEd]

Hi Paul .. great ... when will you put the 1000m session in?

the balance of the first 5 days from the 2000m session is most important

so if you put the 2000's on as yesterday, you cannot do a long run today .. you do need an easy day after the 2000's

then after the easy run the Long Run is quality

then an easy day

then the 1000's

the pattern of one day hard one day easy is important, not so much on which day you do it

So please have a rethink and while you missing long runs, if you do 1hr runs to compensate then great .. son your easy day runs increase it to 1hr instead of the 30 to 40 minutes with the pace being easy

Cheers

TheEd

[pabstars]

Hi TheEd,

Great, then I'll do an easy run tonight and a long one tomorrow. The 6*1 will probably be on Thursday. Sometimes, I do two hard runs in two days because some of my intervals are together with some running buddies where we just all must be a bit flexible. I know that a run of 1.5 hours is considered quality when you do 10K schedules but for old marathoners running 18K in 1.5 hours isn't too taxing but I'll stick to your advice :mrburns:

Cheers,
Paul

[TheEd]

Great Paul .. if you analyse those first 5 to 8 days you will see that the bulk is placed within those days.

as the runner adjusts to the program the workload in actual fact increases, athletes who I coached on a one on one basis graduated to where they were doing am runs 4 to 5 times a week (doubles) and then on the Saturday after the 2k's on Thursday they would do a hill session before the Sunday long run, with development they would get round to doing 2hrs on the Sunday

the secret to this schedule is that it can be progressively developed and if the athlete does need to miss days that they still keep the cycle of hard easy hard as it is the consistency of the cycle that leads to improvement as well as training the body when to go up & down to better plan long-term performances

and whereas the 18.5km for old marathoners is not too taxing the cycles are important, as they have been proven to work, so if there are things thrown in out of 'sync' we can easily change the pattern to get results.

I certainly hope this all helps in explaining the logic behind everything

Cheers

TheEd

[pabstars]

Hi TheEd,

I have followed your piece of advice and only run the quality sessions after recovery days. The long trip was run in 4.50/K and I only covered 17.4 K because the weather was awful. Actually it was tougher to cover this distance than I had expected!

Today, I ran 6*1K on a treadmill. The pace was good and the session extremely tough. However, for each 1K the result was very modest because the first 30 seconds are used on getting the right pace from walking to the target pace. For example, the second last K was run with a constant pace of 3.54; the end result was 4.11 because of the slow start. The sessions were run from 3.58 to 4.11 where the slowest pace was 3.54 and the fastest 3.30. The breaks were a little longer than 1m because the treadmill had a 60S cooldown period. However, to me this isn't all that important; it was just interesting to run the sessions at a nasty and fast pace and I was totally exhausted after my treadmill meeting!

At the moment, the recovery runs are a little shorter than prescribed in the program due to too little time; however, my emphasis is definitely on the quality sessions and everything's just fine here.

The next couple of weeks, quite a few of the quality sessions will be on a treadmill as it just keeps on snowing and snowing. I expect to run 5K on a treadmill on Monday in about 20 minutes. The slow start on the treadmill may may mean that the time will be close to 20:30 but that's also just fine!

Have a nice weekend.

Cheers,
Paul

[TheEd]

do note .. that with the easy runs as the athlete develops a distance is set and it isn't according to time

easy runs can be 10km in the future

or 8 to 10km depending on time

here's hoping the patterns get easier because the weather is not playing its part

Cheers

TheEd