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Week 8: Spring and speed is in the air

Posted on February 21st, 2021 by

You’ve made it to the last week of Part 1 of the Speeding up for Spring Schedule, Chasers. Congrats! What better way to celebrate than a mile time trial?! 😉 (and hopefully some easing of restrictions; fingers crossed for tomorrow). There is still a bit of work to do this week before the time trial though, so let’s get to it!

First up, we have a progression run, which will help you with some eventual longer distances. The total length of the run is 1 hour, broken down as follows:

  •  10 min of easy running to warm up
  •  40 minutes where you progressively get faster every 10 minutes. The guide for the pacing is your estimated marathon pace + 20 sec for the first 10 minutes, and then speed up by 10 sec for each subsequent 10 min. This is assuming you are calculating your pace min minutes/mile! If you’re calculating in min/kilometer, then it’s more like 6 or 7 sec every 10 minutes. This is a guide though; essentially you’ll want to go a bit slower than a steady pace at the beginning and then be going a bit faster than a steady pace by the end. Don’t go crazy, because you’ll need those legs for the mile time trial!
  • 10 min of easy running to cool down

For your usual Thursday speed session, you will be warming up the legs for the mile time trial. It’s just an easy 3 miles run followed by 4 sets of 100m strides at the end to get those legs ticking over.

You can obviously choose to do the mile trial at a time that suits you best, but the schedule is optimized to give you a several days after the progression run of easy running before “race day”. As a reminder, the two “official routes” for the mile are either in Regent’s Park or Victoria Park. See the Strava links below.

  • Regent’s Park – https://www.strava.com/routes/2789261528418718246
  • Victoria Park – https://www.strava.com/routes/2796131768464354712

Good luck with the time trial this week, have fun and run safely! This means being cautious of others as well as warming up and cooling down appropriately.

Part 2 of the Speeding up for Spring Schedule will be posted soon.

Happy Running!

Sarah