UKC

Just done a 50min 10k. My aim is for sub 50mins for my first 10k in a few weeks.

Bloody hard work and i felt good but how I improve on this is beyond me.

Those calves are gonna hurt tomorrow.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Well done! If you've done 50 mins on your own, you'll go faster in the race - race times are always a bit quicker than training times, as you get dragged round.

You'll improve by running more. Is there a running club you could join? Running with other people always helps motivate you, and they may have decent structured training sessions.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers: well done.. just more training.. keep doing the same for now and you'll probably improve to a plateau.. then you need to get smarter.. train harder..

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

"Dick".

kind regards,
Thundcat (still on 1 hr 2mins)



Seriously though - well done mate. Feel like I'm almost running along side you on this one...

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Ha ha, I'm stuck on ~52 min at the moment and trying to make it sub-50.

All my local routes are quite hilly though, I hope I might make it next time I do a flat race

Congratulations!

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Keep running, and increase volume slowly. Give it 5-10 years

Lose weight

Simple really!

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Do some speed work.

Run some shorter (5km?) runs at the pace you want to acheive for the 10k, 4:45 per km pace say.

That way youll see whats needed to get the time. Once ur comfortable with 5km at 4.45 pace then up the distance and or try and get down to 4:35 pace say.

It helped me.

In reply to Darren09:

Yeah, Im doing that at the minute. I do one fast 5KM per week. Best so far with this is 23:30 so that makes a 47min 10k, yeah.

Im my dreams.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:
I watched a bit of the MK half marathon on Sunday anyone who runs more than 50 yards gets kudos!

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

My flat fast 5km is about 24 mins so that gives me hope that I might make the 50 min 10km on a flat route

Actually my pb for 10km is 46:25, but that was a one-off and happened just after I had come back to sea level after spending a month or so at ~3000m. Never got close without the altitude training!

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Never say never!

Seriously. You can do it. Dont make the mistake i did when i started and run at the same pace. Mine was 4.40 and it didnt matter what distance it was over thats what the avg was all the time.

Mix it up so as not to get stuck in a rut.

Just get the pace sorted at a comfortably challenging figure and up the diatance to get to 10k.

Having one of those fancy gps watch's does help with pacing though.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Like someone said in another post recently. 10Km is seen as a sprint by the top guys and that can put others off as you prob cant imagine goin hell for leather for 3 qtrs of an hour.
It scares the sh#t out of me.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Well done on what you've done so far, but that suggests a lack of endurance over 10k compared to 5k.

Roughly how far are you running a week? I wouldn't get rid of the fast 5k, but if your target is a faster 10k I'd look at increasing the volume of running. Keep the extra volume easy (indeed a lot of schools of thought on training would suggest the easier the better) and your 10k pace will start to get closer to your 5k pace.

In reply to Liam M:

2-3 10ks and a 5k in between. I was thinking about doing a long, easy half marathon this weekend at about 10.5kms per hour to see how the legs (and the stitch) cope with it.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

I got my speed up a fair bit by doing 400m reps at a track and some fast hilly 5k training runs. Nothing too crazy, but the harder effort over shorter distances seemed to work.

In reply to Darren09:

Thanks, I'm hopeful.

And ive just invested in a Suunto Ambit which is a very clever little doozy and great for keeping track.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers: Its great that there are many enthusiastic runners on here. I try and talk to friends about it and they just get bored.

I would also like to think that I could do with a decent hilly session. I run in and around Newark which is a flat as the proverbial pancake other than a few rail and motorway bridges.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers: i'd really recommend finding a track and doing some proper speedwork if you can. Otherwise get that Ambit to work and do some half mile or 1k reps. Try to run 6x1k efforts at about 4:45 (so faster than your target pace) with a couple of minutes jog recovery in between.

Other key session is a longer, slow run - for a10k try to get up to running 10 miles - if you aim to do it in under 90 mins or so that'll really help with endurance.

In reply to andy: Im assuming that the Amit has an interval setting for this kind of work - Im still getting through the owners manual.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Try and build your endurance, if improving your 10k is going to be your target you need not run more than 8-9 miles. Some sort of speed work will be helpful, but for me that was mainly regular 5k racing in the early days, do you have a local parkrun. Trying to do speed work on your own takes the sort of discipline that I don't have.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Yep. Fairly basic - you can set 2 intervals (ie effort and recovery) and the number of repeats.

I have a "track running" mode on mine where I've turned auto-lap off, and i've set up an app that gives me 400m lap pace in seconds, plus total time and lap counts - then i just use the lap button each lap (or if i'm doing 1k reps on the 400m, 800m and 1k then again after my 200m recovery).

In reply to Darren09:

That isn't really true, a good 10k is going to be very controlled, whilst the top guys might be running as fast or faster than your flat out sprint speed, they are not sprinting, except for maybe the last few hundred metres, but we should all be doing that.

A lot of the guys running 30 minute 10ks are also able to run say 1:50 800m, more than a minute a mile faster than they are running the 10k.

In reply to andy: The track is my favourite.. you have 400m points..

Its also brutally honest..

Just run more, do a few 'enjoyable' runs a week.. they do help, see landmarks.. scenery, friends..

But include 1 hard session, 2 once used to that..

Just be careful... you'll improve rapidly at first but do not want too much too soon and think long term.. most/many get excited by their improvements push to hard.. break down.. give up..

You will hit plateaus.. we all did and do.. but just stay injury free and learn to love running and its great.

In reply to IainRUK:

And there you have it in one sentence. Just the fact that i can take for granted that I go out of the door and run 10k is enjoyable in itself. The fact that i can do a, for me, respectable time is great at my age and the fact that im not a natural runner.

And ive lost a stone in a couple of month helps too.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

Try not to get quite so fixated on 5km, 10km and half marathon runs. There's nothing magical about them. For 10ks, it's good to run a bit longer - 12-14ks - but you don't need to go as far as a half-marathon. If you're only doing 10k at the moment, a jump up to a half is a big leap, which will probably do more harm than good.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers: echoing what tony said I'd try some trail/fell races, take the fixation away from time... with 10k's people get too fixated on times and you can't always run pbs.

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers: I think many get too bogged down with times at first, as they do tumble when you start training, so you get a lot of positive feedback.. but many quit the sport when that stops happening, which is a pity.

The extreme example of this was a local Eryri runner/climber.. overweight smoker.. worked hard, got fitter and fitter, it was impressive, ran sub 40 eventually I think he ran 36:50 or so.. for 10k...

He then proclaimed he'd run a sub 35 by the time he was 50? The problem was, and maybe we should have said, the 10k he ran sub 37 in was 9.5k... everyone was a good 90s-2 mins up on their time.. and GPS's confirmed the course was wrongly measured..

In reality he'd hit a plateau which most people hit somewhere between 45-35 minutes depending on fitness and moderate training load..

Times no longer tumbled, he lost interest and he's not been to a race in 2 years and is unfit again.

It was a pity as he'd found the love of running but had become fixated on times and kudos from good times and not the actual running, those people soon get bored and leave the sport at that plateau.. and its such a petty.. the plateau is beatable.. just not easily.. and the problem is even staying on the ruddy thing is hard work.. so you no longer get that positive feedback from training..

I think its why trail and fell help, they remove that fixation.

In reply to IainRUK:

You can't always run pbs - something to remember for training, and something I'm really bad at. Don't try to make every run faster than the last one. Don't be unhappy or dissatisfied if your times for a set route vary by a few minutes - natural variances in the way you're feeling and running will get in the way. I've found that learning to deal with this has been one of my biggest challenges.

In reply to tony:

I had that at first. Every session would be as hard as I could manage. To some extent it worked early on, but when I started running more often and further it meant I never really recovered, and never improved at any distance.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came when I discovered that running most (c.80-90%) of my weekly distance at 9m/m+ didn't stop me running 6.40-7m/m in races. It was great; I could run 6 days a week, I wouldn't feel permanently broken, I could hurt like hell on interval sessions and still manage to run in the subsequent days, I'd get to races feeling stronger than I ever had before and psychologically of much benefit I'd find myself flying through the field in the last few kms as all the positive split merchants cracked.