Category: Sport

Sunday Ten

On average this is 4-hour marathon pace, or 5:40/km, but accelerating towards the end - once the motor warms up it feels quite easy run at 5:30-5:20 pace, at least for 10k at a time...

No long run (which now is defined as ~20k) last week then. Rest is good too...

8k at 5:14 pace

Through the Finnish running forum I found a Jim2's running page which seems to have a lot of useful information. The Ultimate Speed Workout is... simply a 10k race.

So the idea was to warm up for 1k, and then run properly for 10k at around 5:20 pace, which is slightly faster than last weekends Forssa half-marathon pace of 5:32/km. That was probably a bit optimistic, as it felt like serious work up to around 5k, after which some kind of runners-high sets in, calves, legs and everything relax and settle in on the pace while kilometers 6, 7, and 8 fly by much faster than the planned 5:20. After that it's a struggle again for km 9, and I decided 8 fast kilometers were enough...

Forssa half-marathon

I was a bit too far back in the start, and had to criss-cross among slower starters for at least the first 3 km. A strong side/aft wind made the first few kilometers easy downwind 'sailing', and luckily the route took a more protected less windy road after the turn at 10 km. After around 13km when it was windy again, now a side/head-wind, I slipstreamed in tour-de-france-style in the wake of a group of runners to avoid the worst wind. This course is very flat and fast, and I caught up with the 2-hour pace-runners(dressed in black tuxedos!) somewhere between 19 and 20 km.

Results and info: http://www.suvi-ilta.fi

While driving home through Perniö I saw some serious long distance runners taking part in a 100 km race. These people do 20 laps on a 5 km course, some in under 8 hours...

4x1k @ ~5:00/km

This is certainly a very different way of running an 11k at an average pace of 6:28/km. All the training programs for half or full marathons recommend some form of intervals. Recommended distances range anywhere between 400 m to 1 mile (1600 m) with a few minutes of walking or easy jogging between repeats.

I'm not sure how/if the garmin 405cx can be set up for interval training, so I just did 1k of walking/jogging between my "fast" 1k's at ~5:00/km. Those slow resting km's took over 7 min, which is probably a little too much rest between repeats.

There are a lot of 4 hour-target-time marathon training programs out there. Finnish running-site "seppola" has these 1k at 5:00 pace intervals. I think Kuehls book talks about up to sixteen 400m repeats at 5:00 pace, while Galloway's program has 4-8x 1 mile repeats at 5:20 pace and Janne Holmen's program (see also here) has fewer long 3-4k repeats at 5:18/km or so.

There's a race in Forssa on Saturday(which I haven't signed up for...yet)