Warm-up and two 5Ks with the speed group--one fast (kind of!) and one slow.
Comments
From Sasha Pachev on Thu, May 08, 2008 at 17:22:27
How fast were the 5 Ks, how hard did they feel, and why no run on Wednesday?
From Cheryl on Thu, May 08, 2008 at 17:47:27
Sasha--How fast should you run the 5k's? Just wondering how fast you think we should be running.
From Sasha Pachev on Thu, May 08, 2008 at 18:26:02
I think you should not be running any speed right now and instead put all of your energy into mileage. Every single runner in your group I have looked at it is not limited by speed in any of the races 5 K or longer. Speed work by its very nature cuts down how much base mileage you can run safely. This is OK if you are comfortably handling the base mileage level at which you are hitting the law of diminishing returns, which I would predict to be around 50-80 miles a week for the average person in your group. But nobody in your group as far as I know runs anywhere close to that kind of mileage.
Going from 20 miles a week to 60 will improve your marathon by about 40 minutes. Adding speed work at any point without increasing the mileage may improve it by a minute or two for the lucky ones that respond to speed work. For others, adding speed work will just make them hit the wall sooner and actually slow down their marathon time. The 5 K times will be faster with speed work, though, but still you are talking improvements of minutes from base mileage vs improvements of 20-30 seconds from speed work alone.
In addition to physiological disadvantages, speed sessions waste a lot of time. You could run twice the distance in the same amount of time if you just went a steady pace vs a standard speed session.
For your group runs you should just go out at a comfortable pace and have a good time. It is OK for faster runners to slow down to the pace that the slower runners are able to sustain. Maybe have a 5 K time trial once every two weeks just to see where you are at, but nothing more than that.
From Cheryl on Thu, May 08, 2008 at 19:38:25
Sasha--Thanks for the input.
From Sasha Pachev on Mon, May 12, 2008 at 17:27:12
Any training since then?
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