Speed Development Thursday 6 June 2024 – 2/1

3 June 2024 - By Jodee Mayer

This week’s faster 5k session takes place at Witham Park, CM8 1HN so you may want to consider bringing along your bug spray. Please join Graham and Ian at Witham Town Park (meeting point near W3W ///mixing.lunge.condiment) for a prompt 7:30pm start where the session will commence with some warm up drills.

As always it would be beneficial to do an easy jog prior to commencing the session so maybe park at Tesco and jog to the meeting point, down the connecting path to the River View end of the park.

The session will consist of 10 x 2 minute runs with 1 minute recoveries. The recoveries are walk/jog, the choice is your own.

The 2 minute runs should be a few seconds faster than your normal 5k pace which will help increase your “lactate threshold” your ability to sustain running at a higher intensity for a longer period.

As I’m sure most of you know during high-intensity exercise, muscles require more oxygen than the body can take in, causing anaerobic respiration and lactic acid build-up.

At what point lactic acid develops depends on a person’s fitness level. The body clears lactic acid when it develops, but it may not be able to keep up when the levels start to increase rapidly.

Therefore, running at your usual pace for 2 minutes on and 1 minute off will not render any discernible changes to your lactate threshold and we encourage you to push yourself just a little bit outside your comfort zone.

We will use a whistle to signal the commencement of each 2 minute run and the 1 minute recoveries.

Final thing to mention there will be other members of the public in the park, some with their dogs so please be careful, courteous and considerate at all times.