A new year and new goals

Not much activity recorded in this blog, but I have been doing some running. I plan to do a lot of hard fast runs in January 2010, to try and improve speed overall. This is in preparation for my next 20 week training period leading up to the Gold Coast Marathon again in July this year, the program will commence in Feb 2009..

My goals for 2010:

- Break 4min/km average over 3km
- Break 4min/km average over 5km
- Break 4min/km average over 8km
- Break 4min/km average over 10km
- Go faster in the next GC HM in July

So far I have managed over the Christmas and new year break to get in a few speed runs. In general I am going to try and incorporate speed and endurance in the following manner:

- Any normal week ( non-recovery), in 30, 40 or 50 minute runs I do will have an initial speed component
- In any given week I may be in recovery so will not do any speed component
- The weekly long run will have no speed component.

The speed component will be a simple interval scheme, and in several stages:

Stage 1: 2 minutes at speed, 1:30 normal pace, work up to doing that 5 times in a row in a distance run. Once I can do that consistently move to the next stage

Stage 2: 2:30 at speed, 1:30 normal pace. Work up to doing that 5 times in a row in a distance run. Once I can do that consistently, move again to the next stage

Stage 3: 3 minutes at speed, 1 minute at normal pace. Work up to doing that 5 times in a row in a distance run. Once I can do that consistently, move again to the next stage

Stage 4: 3:30 at speed, 30seconds normal. Work up to doing that 5 times in a row in a distance run. Once I can do that consistently, move again to the next stage

Stage 5: 4 minutes at speed, work up to doing that 5 times in a row in a distance run.


At the moment I am only at Stage 1, and only 2 minutes speed/1:30 normal sequence 3 times in a row. I did that Saturday 2nd Jan :

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/21642174

In that run I managed 12:41 min for 3km doing the interval pacing, which is quite interesting. My previous efforts doing 3km TT's :

- 12:32 on Oct 16 2009

- 12:14 Aug 4 2009

- 12:57 and 12:54 on July 23, 2009


So it appears that I am running at a similar pace overall to previous 3km TT's, apart from the faster one I did in Aug 2009. I recall that Aug 4 was around the time when things started to wrong - flu, and bad left knee.

I think that overall I am at a good point for this early stage of the year, pace is good and endurance ok. I am at a point where if I work hard enough sped will improve.