tapering

As the big race gets ever nearer the training has now changed focus.  The last week (and the next two) will see an ever increasing amount of speedwork.  Got to be careful though whilst tapering ... so, more and more speedwork whilst also decreasing the total volume of training (and no long runs).

This means, in theory, that I should have recovered from all the hard training over the past few months.  So, yesterday I travelled to Leeds to run one of the weekly parkrun 5k events.  I had absolutely no idea what to expect but in the end I decided to go out at 18:20 pace (3:40 per km) and see what would happen.

My kilometre times were 3:41 ... 3:50 ... 3:50 ... 3:50 ... 3:31

I finished 10th out of 259 with a time of 18:42.

Slightly disappointed with that but training the day before may have left me slightly tired.  I did 5 x 1200m in 4:35 each with 600m jog recovery between the efforts.  A very busy week helping Keir organise himself for starting university on the 15th September probably left me slightly tired too ... all that's finished now though.

Anyway 18:42 represents an age graded time of 16:33 which is only a few seconds slower than my best ever age graded 5k time.  Something positive there then.

Hopefully we'll see an improvement next week when I don't have any speedwork the day before ...