Episode 62: 3 Ingredients for Your Fastest 5k

The Strength Running Podcast

Jason Fitzgerald

Health & Fitness, 10k, Beginnerrunning, Marathontraining, Fitness, Injuryprevention, Marathon, Halfmarathon, Running, Sports

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2018

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the years of coaching hundreds of athletes to new personal bests from 1.5 mile military fitness tests up to the 50-mile ultramarathon distance, I’ve been given a “private look” inside how runners approach their training.

And most of the time, I’m horrified! There’s no progression. They avoid race-specific workouts. I see pacing mistake after pacing mistake.

If you want to run faster you need to take the next logical step in how you prepare and plan your training schedule. Even though you might think the 5k is short, it demands very specific workouts.

Good 5k training includes three distinct aspects of running fitness: speed, race-specific fitness, and endurance.

Over-emphasize endurance and you won’t have that “higher gear” to hammer the last mile.

Skip the specific 5k workouts and you’ll feel flat with no power.

Balancing all three ensures that you’ll feel powerful on race day and accomplish your race goals. So if you’re wondering how to train for a 5k, here’s how to execute each one (no matter what fitness level you’re at right now).

Learn more about SR's training programs if you'd like to race faster! See https://strengthrunning.com/coaching/ for more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is episode 62 of the strength-running podcast and today I'm going to share a solo episode with you today about the 5K.
0:25.0	The 5,000 is one of the shortest distance events in track and field and one of my favorite events.
0:31.0	It blends a great combination of endurance and speed into one race,
0:37.4	meaning to get good at it, you have to have both endurance and speed. And even though I love the 5KK it's one of my favorite events
0:45.0	I don't think I'm very good at it.
0:47.0	It was always an event that I struggled with and I usually felt a lot more comfortable
0:51.0	racing both shorter and longer races.
0:54.0	Actually, let me tell you about my 5KPR. It's kind of a funny story.
0:58.0	It's pretty unusual. It was the spring of 2006. I was a senior in college and we were at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
1:09.0	And I had one of my really fast friends who had already graduated pace me in the race and the meat director said that, you know, this was okay, it was a pretty small 5K.
1:21.0	And about 10 minutes before the race started, my friend still wasn't there at the meet.
1:26.0	So I didn't know what to do. I was like, okay, I'm just going to run a normal race without a pacer because I had the intuition that I was going to win this race.
1:39.0	There was only about six people in the race and I had the fastest seed time. So about eight minutes before the
1:45.6	race is scheduled to start. I'm almost ready. I'm going through the final stages of
1:50.2	my warm-up. My friend shows up smelling like alcohol. He had been out drinking the night before and
1:58.0	showed up, he said he was hung over, I just couldn't believe it. I said,
2:02.0	dude, you were you promised to pace me in this
2:04.6	race and the goal for the day was to try to break 16 minutes for 5K. My PR at the time was
2:12.4	1605 and I thought that I was in good shape even though I was coming off an arch strain over the last week or so.
2:20.0	But nevertheless he got ready in about five minutes and he took me out and we
2:26.7	started the race and despite him being hung over he paced me to a 1602 5K PR. He said that I was breathing like a stuck pig only 200 meters into the race because, well, that's what the 5K is. It's a very fast hard vent where you are redlining almost
2:45.9	from the very beginning of the race. So thank you to my friend Adam for pacing me.
	...

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