Diary Of A Road Runner

5k Time Trial – Cloudy and Cold – 25m 11s

Again I put this down as a tempo run, although am not sure what the correct terminology is, as it’s not strictly a tempo run but more of a hard run/time trial. My feeling is, to run a faster 10k, I need to be able to maintain a sub 25 pace over 5k first – if I can’t do that, there’s no way I would be able to do it over 10k! In any case, I probably ran it too hard for it to be a tempo run, so it was more of a time trial, as I was running a very hard pace, and not comfortable!

I set off maybe a bit too quickly on this run, and got the pacing a bit wrong in the early stages, as I was doing well within 5 mins per k pace – something like 4:30 at times. Had to slow when the 4th k was up an incline, then the last k was flying downwards, I put on a burst of speed in this last k and thought I might blast through in well under 25 mins, but trundled over in 25m 11s, slower than my last 5k time trial, and I found this a hard run! Was pretty knackered when I finished, but was at least able to replicate the 25 minutes-ish pace of my last 5k tempo/time trial. I would really have struggled to carry on at this pace for 10k, but if I keep improving, 25 minute 5k pace may come to seem as easy as 26 minutes pace is for me now (but wasn’t a few weeks back!)