Week 3: Run for your mother, but don’t stay up all night to get lucky
Posted on March 14th, 2021 by Sarah Funderburk
Happy Mother’s day today to our UK mom’s (note to self – send Mother’s day card in May)! Our next holiday is one of my favorite’s, St Patrick’s day. So pick a Chaser, and go out for a nice easy run or walk for luck on Wednesday this week. You will need Wednesday this week as either an easy recovery run or a full day of recovery between this week’s Tuesday and Thursday sessions.
On Tuesday, we have another progression run. This type of run is especially good for those of you training for a spring half marathon. As a guide, like several weeks back, you will speed up those legs every 10 minutes. The breakdown is:
- 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.
- 10 min of easy running to cool down
Be sure to start easy enough so you can conitnue to push yourself at the end of the 40 minutes.
For your speed session this week, we are moving to 1200m repeats. This session should feel a bit more relaxed than the 800m at 5k pace you did two weeks ago. You will still be going at a good clip though, so the longer distance/time will be the challenge. Therefore, focus on not going out too fast so you can stay relatively steady on each repeat and have enough energy to kick it up a notch on the last one. The session by distance is:
3-4 x {1200m (10k pace) [400m jog recovery]} – total 3600-4800m hard, 1200-1600m recovery
For a time-based variation, you can do:
3-4 x {5min (10k pace) [2min jog recovery]} – total 15-20min hard, 6-8min recovery
Remember to warm up and coold down with at least 10 minutes of easy running before and after the session. Incorporating drills before like we typically do at track is also a good idea. If you need some inspiration for drills, give me a shout!
Happy running!
Sarah
