Club night tempo

Hi-viz reflective clothing or other forms of head or hand torches are now essential to ensure your safety.

Visitors and prospective members welcome.

Structured Training Session Race Pace training

Question: How do I race faster? Answer: Practice race pace, practice race pace, practice race pace

To become more proficient at a skill, you have to perform that skill on a regular basis. In other words, if you want to run a three-hour marathon, you have to practice running at a three-hour marathon pace. A no brainer you might say. However, as simplistic as this idea seems, many runners preparing for a time goal fail to train at race pace. But only running at your goal pace will give you the exact cardiovascular, biomechanical and neuromuscular training that such an effort requires.

Race-pace workouts are most often used in marathon training, but they’re beneficial at any distance. So maybe your first decision prior to undertaking a full race pace training session is to decide what distance your race pace training is for.

While we cannot replicate a full race pace session on a Thursday night I have taken the main points from a Runners World article which is at the bottom of this post and makes a good read for anyone who is interested.

So, on this Thursday’s ‘race pace’ training session we are aiming to help improve your lactate threshold, enabling you to run at a faster pace before your body starts to tire.

We will congregate at our new meeting place, DS Fitness and begin our briefing at 7:30pm. We will then jog to Eastways Industrial Estate, where, after drills and warm up, our session will take place along the main road in Eastways.

While some sessions need to be a ‘one size fits all’ you can tailor this particular session specific to your requirements. To do this decide what race distance you are going to be targeting for the session. Most of you will have raced distances ranging from 5k up to marathon distance and will therefore have an idea of your current pace for those races. The idea for this session is that you will aim to run 5 to 10% quicker per effort. We are also looking for consistency of pace so to keep it interesting we would like you to mentally plant a flag in the ground when you hit your first 2-minute effort. You then recover 30 seconds further out along the road, turn back for 30 seconds and hit that flag at the start of your 2-minute effort back. If your pacing is consistence then you should end up back at the start at the 2-minute mark. You can then recover round the loop for 30 seconds, turn, recover back for 30 seconds and then repeat. Given we are only putting in 2-minute efforts we would recommend targeting a shorter distance for your pacing. i.e. 5k; 5-mile; 10k or 10 mile pace For any runners who do not have race experience and may be unsure of what speed to run at, try and run slightly faster than your Tuesday night group pace.

We will have a whistle to mark the times, however it would be useful if you can set your watch. 2 minute/1 minute (or 30 seconds x 2) repeats will do the job

One of us will have a car at Eastways for you to put your coats etc in. and remember your Hi-Vis

We look forward to seeing you there.

Rachael & Graham

Marathon

Work out your goal marathon pace (time divided by distance. i.e. 3h 59m 59s = 9m 10s). Do your race pace workout early in the week, and add one mile every week. Once you reach 10 miles, move the GMP run to every other weekend, alternating it with your slower-paced long run. Then build the GMP run to no more than 15 miles; the last one should be three to four weeks from race day. A final five-mile GMP run a week out from race day should feel easy.

Half-Marathon

Half-marathon pace (about 15 to 25 seconds per mile faster than marathon pace) This speed for a lot of runners would be associated with traditional tempo runs. Therefore, your weekly tempo runs are your race-pace workouts. Start with three miles and increase by a half-mile every week until you are comfortably running at half-marathon race pace for eight miles. Give yourself at least one easy recovery day before and after these workouts. Cap your tempo sessions at eight miles (plus warmup and cooldown); otherwise, the workout too closely mimics an actual race, which requires extended recovery.

10-K

At 10-K race pace, you should be running just under your VO2 max–a demanding intensity. So keep intervals to a max of two miles and total 10-K race-pace volume per workout to four miles. Here are a few of my favorites: a descending ladder of two miles, one mile, 800 meters, 800 meters with 1:1 time recovery. Or 4 x 1 mile with 1:1 time recovery.

5-K

Because of the high intensity of 5-K race pace, the farthest you should run at this speed in training is one mile, and that will likely feel tough due to the accumulation of lactic acid. So I suggest using more palatable distances for 5-K pace intervals: 800, 1000, or 1200 meters. Try: 6 to 8 x 800 with 1:1 time recovery; 2 x (1200, 1000, 800) with 1:1 time recovery.

Saturday Cycling

Hopefully there will be more than a few out this Saturday even though Wix 5 on Sunday may reduce numbers a little. So we’re keeping it local with a visit to the Braxted Bakery in case anyone simply fancies an outing for some much needed carbo-loading! Weather continues to look good, with sunny and dry conditions forecast but may be a bit chilly to start with.

Please arrive at Morrisons around 9am for a 9:05 departure and make sure you and your bike are ready.

Out via Rickstones Road, turn right and under the A12 and straight up the hill (as this was Trevor’s suggestion…). A slight change a bit further along as there’s some road works on Grange Road so turn left down the “dip” past the pink house. Then there’s a choice of either left down the hill then right to Messing or right towards Tiptree and pick up the usual route at Oak Road. At Messing, usual route through Easthorpe, Hardy’s Green, Birch, Layer-de-la Haye, crossing Abberton Reservoir then the drag to Heybridge through Tolleshunt D’Arcy and Goldhanger. Just past the Caravan park at Heybridge take the right turning towards Totham, up Goat Lodge Lane and past the Green Man.

Hope to see you all at Morrison’s.

James

Long run

Routes and distances decided on day within each group.