After over a year of constant marathon training I’ve decided to spice things up this spring and summer. It’s not that I’m in a rut, it’s just that if I switch gears a bit I think it’ll help me both mentally and physically for any future marathon training I do.

For one thing I want to improve my speed and leg strength. To that end I have two 5k races and a possible half marathon scheduled out to May. I’m also working in some resistance leg workouts which I haven’t done since running as well as hill repeats. I’ve never been particularly fast but I’d like to be faster. I’ve switched over to the FIRST 5K training plan which incorporates faster paces and fewer overall miles than the marathon plan which only makes sense. The dates for my events don’t really fall perfectly so I’m really using the training plan as an overall plan that’ll have races sandwiched within it in place of weekend “long” runs. The half marathon is kind of an outlier in relation to the 5K training plan so I’ll likely up the long runs on a few of the planned runs to better prep for that. 13 miles doesn’t worry me. 13 miles was my shortest long run in my marathon training plan! I looked forward to the 13 mile days, so a half is not daunting.

In terms of goals I just want to improve my PRs. My unofficial 5K PR is 23:20 which just happened during a training run one day last summer. I started out on a typical day and realized I was moving at a decent clip. I just kept going until I’d hit the 5K mark and clocked in at that time. My current goal is beating 23 minutes which I think is attainable. I’d like to keep chipping away at it and ideally would love to beat 20 minutes eventually, but that’s going to take a lot of work over the summer. That’s not necessarily bad and is, in fact, precisely what I want. But 3 minutes over 5K is pretty substantial and I’m not underestimating the difficulty.

My unofficial half marathon PR is from the Shamrock Marathon at 1:58:44. It’s possible I’ve done better in a training run but I don’t recall right now. I know I can beat that with ease but by how much is a better question. Go out too fast and blow my energy on the first 10K or go out too slow and wind up with time left on the clock and energy left in the tank. Tough call. I imagine I’ll shoot for a 1:45 time to start with which calls for a relatively reasonable 8:00/mile pace. Doable? We’ll see.

Posted Goals and Hopes |