I feel the need, the need for speed...

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This year I have been enjoying more long distance running and, in particular, trail running. This has given me a new lease of running life. Hours spent on rough trails surrounded by flowers and butterflies, climbing hills and admiring the views, chatting with friends, basking in the warm sun and enduring the snow. My stamina has increased massively and my legs and glutes are much stronger from all the hill work.

After 7 months I have now banked over 800 miles, way ahead of schedule. I’m loving it and will continue to run like this, but… There’s always a but. It does mean that I have neglected my parkrun times. Not a bad thing but I would like to get back to a decent time on a Saturday morning rather than incorporating it into my long run.

From this week I’m starting to mix it up a bit. I’m going to add some speed work to my long runs and re-establish some core exercises too. This means the mileage will drop but I should reduce my risk of injury and be able to compete near the front of the parkrun pack again.

I’ve recently begun running on Thursday nights with John and we’ve done a few long runs that you can read about on this blog. This will now become our speedwork session. There are a number of different methods available including fartleks and pyramid sessions.

Fartleks involved timed intervals e.g. 1 minute hard, 30 secs recovery repeated a number of times. Pyramids are also interval sessions, but the length of time extends before reducing again e.g. 30 secs hard, 30 secs recovery, 1 min hard, with 1 min recovery, up to 2 mins and then back down again. Instead of time you can also do distances e.g. 200m, 400m, 600m, 800m, 600m, 400m, 200m.

My main core exercise will be planks but I’ll add some press ups and crunches too. Last winter I had a very strong core and was managing over 100 press ups and crunches every day with 5 minutes of planking. Not only did this result in no injuries but my times were much quicker.

Stat attack! My current Folkestone 5k pb is 18:47. My best this year has been 19:34 and I’ve only been under 20 minutes three times in 2018. Compare that with the fact I was only over 20 minutes 10 times in 27 attempts in 2017.

With a good mixture of speed and stamina training I should be a more balanced runner, a less injury prone runner and a faster 5k, 10k, half and full marathon runner. We will see….

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