Thoughts on my training before this weekends half-marathon race in Alstertal

This Sunday, I’ll be running my next race: The half-marathon in Alsteral. It’s a pretty nice race, most of it on a packed-dirt path along the river Alster. “Along a river” sounds like a flat race, but there is not too much space along the river, so there are a lot of ups and downs on the banks of the river. Definitely not a PR course. I’ll post some GPS data from my Garmin 405 after the race.

(Photo by mike warren)

The best time I have run there is a 1:38:30, and I would like to be able to run in that neighborhood. They had to change the course a bit this year, and it sounds like this means another few hills, so I’m not sure how comparable the times will be. Sub-1:40 should be possible, but the race is a B or C priority, so I’m not too focused on a specific time – I just want to run a nice, focused race at a faster pace than in my regular training.

Mixed Intervals

Speaking of my training, I’m really enjoying the new possibilities with the 405. This Tuesday, I was doing some mixed interval session. I was trying to do the following faster parts:

• 2k @ marathon pace (~5:00 min/k)
• 2k @ half-marathon pace (~4:30)
• 1 mile @ 10k pace (~4:10)
• 1k @ 5k pace (sub 4:00)
• 800 @ “really fast pace” (no idea .. maybe ~3:30?)

In between these segments there were 3 minutes “active recovery”, so some walking and easy jogging. (Advanced versions of this have shorter recoveries, but I’m certainly not ready for that.)

Maybe I don’t have a good understanding of my paces at this point, but as soon as I got to 10k pace, it was getting really hard. Anything faster than 10k pace was almost impossible, and I had to bail after 500m at 4 min pace. No top-end at all!!

So shorter, faster intervals will definitely be something I have to work on. As I have another 10k race in two weeks, I would like to do some interval sessions at 5k and faster paces. I hope that I don’t have to go to a track but that my 405 allows me to do sessions such as these on the road:

• 5 * 400m @ 3k pace
• 4 * 1k @5k pace

The total distance for these runs would be around 10k total.

I’ll do some running at 10k pace, but that will be more like a Tempo Run rather than fast, short intervals. A sample session would be 2-3 * 1 Mile at 10k pace within a longish run (maybe 13k).

Focusing on “Short&Fast”

All of this goes to show that my training focus has changed a bit (and I’m still struggling with it). While in the first part of the year I was doing longer and longer runs at a leisurely pace, now I’m trying to shake things up a bit by focusing on short and fast stuff.

Hopefully this will allow me to loose some weight as well. I’m still in line for my end-of-September goal of sub-89 kg …