5-10k W1R1

[Narmour]

Yesterday evening at teatime was beautiful here, the sun was shining and the sea breeze was whipping up a bit of a spray along the beach front. Not too warm, not too cold. perfect running weather. I had decided that I needed a bit of structure to my running again so I am doing the RunDouble smartphone app (the original couch to 5k version is free from the Google Play store for Android, I assume you can get it for iPhone too. 5-10k plan costs 99p) to help me get ready for my 10k run in April.

It's the same format for the first few weeks as the c25k plan. Warm up walk, with running and walking intervals, repeated three times in a week. The first week of runs is 8 minutes running, followed by one minute walking, repeated 5 times. 8 minutes running is easy, and by breaking it into these segments I found I had run my furthest ever distance and my longest time a lot more easily than I expected. The 1 minute walks are long enough to give you a tiny bit of fortification for the next run, but not long enough to recover fully so your heart rate is still up.

The plan progresses fairly quickly as the weeks go by, next week is 4x12 mins, then week 3 is 3x18 mins. I'm confident that it'll be manageable. The whole plan takes 6 weeks, although unlike c25k the advice I have received is to stick to your training days like glue and don't deviate from doing day on day off. I found with c25k that sometimes 3 or 4 days passed between runs

So in the end I covered about 7.5kms in 45 minutes (running and walking combined). Which is already on course for the pace that I want to keep for my 10k. Hopefully this programme will build up my stamina so that I can keep it up for the whole distance!!

[hop_along Graduate]

Hi Narmour,

Thanks for giving a good overview of the program.

H

[Fentaz42 Graduate]

I think I'm going to try something like this myself in the not too distant future. I've only done one run since graduating and to be honest I quite liked just listening to my music, and not listening to Laura! Shocking! I know!

I do feel the need for a bit of structure, so maybe in a couple of weeks ill get on to this. Thanks for the little review

[Narmour Graduate]

I will continue to bog on my progress through so keep an eye out for my posts for a better idea of how it's working! Good luck with your journey, I would highly recommend having a structured programme to work through. I was a bit lost for a while there.