35km a week, four runs, all of them somewhere around 6:00 per km because that is what feels comfortable, and my 5K has sat at 27:4x since November. I am 41, no injuries, sleeping fine. I am not chasing a big number, I just want to know what specifically changes this, because adding another easy run has done nothing twice now.
Mildly against the grain here, because everyone will tell you intervals and nobody will ask about strength. I stalled for two years, added two 25 minute sessions a week of squats, single leg work and calf raises, and my times moved without changing a single thing about my running. At 41 the thing that gives out first is usually not your engine.
Fair, and I did exactly that in the wrong order myself. It worked anyway but it took longer than it needed to.
Agreed but sequencing matters. If someone has zero quality running, adding lifting first tends to just make them tired for the same slow runs. Speed work first, strength once the schedule is stable.
I ran the same comfortable pace for three years and called it base building. What it actually was, was one pace I had trained so thoroughly that my legs defaulted to it under any circumstance, including races. Breaking that cost me two months of runs that felt awkward and slow before anything improved, so do not judge the change at week three.
There is a second thing hiding in your numbers: 35km across four runs means every run is roughly the same length. Your long run is not long. Push one of them out to 12 or 14km, keep it slow, and leave the other three alone. That plus one hard session was worth about 90 seconds off my 5K in a spring, at 44 years old.
One hard session, one long run, two truly easy runs. Your easy runs should be slower than 6:00 once the hard day exists. That is the whole prescription and it works on almost everyone stuck where you are.
@muslin_mira · last mo. · 3 replies
You have no stimulus above your comfortable pace, so your body has no reason to change. Add one session a week that is genuinely hard, keep everything else exactly as it is, and give it eight weeks. Most people in your position find a minute or more in the 5K from that single change.
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@blistermaps · 2mo ago
Start with 5 x 3 minutes at a pace you could hold for about 20 minutes flat out, with 2 minutes jog between. No track needed. If you finish the last one able to do a sixth, you paced it right.
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@mat_mira · 2mo ago
What does one hard session look like at my level, intervals on a track or just a faster continuous run?
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