increasing my pace

[lizziej754]

Hiya.

I graduated a couple of weeks ago, and am still loving running, even though I had a bad run yesterday.

What I want to do now is increase my pace. And I was wondering whether it would be beneficial for me to re-do weeks 1-5 C25K on the treadmill at a higher pace, and then do my normal 3-5K runs on my other days.

Any suggestions?

Ta

Lxx

[sfb350 Graduate]

That sounds like a reasonable plan to me - I've been reading up in a couple (ok, several) running magazines and websites, with a view to putting together my own plan, and consensus seems to be that if you want to build up speed you need to include some interval training in your plan. Week One, mixing jogging with faster running would be a good way to introduce that. Some training to improve your core strength, as well as running, is also beneficial.

[magicfee23 Graduate]

Think that is a reasonable plan but totally agree with sfb350 about the interval training too so why not try a bit of both?

I graduated 5 weeks ago and spent a couple of weeks just doing the 30 mins- to make sure I could more than anything. I was still convinced it was a fluke! But then inspired by some other posts on here I started to shake up what I was doing. So now I do 3 different runs every week:

Run 1: I do week one podcast but alternate fast(ish) running and easy jogging instead of jog/walk. I also jog the warm up and cool down walks to give 30 mins total running (but still do my walk before starting the podcast)

Run 2: I do 5 mins easy jog followed by 20 mins of consciously pushing harder and increasing my speed gradually then 5 mins easy jog.

Run 3: Concentrate on keeping an easy pace and adding at least 3 mins on to the previous week- but sometimes I just keep going if I feel good!

Three weeks on and I'm just back from a 48 min easy run- longest yet by quite a way. I've put my data into the pc and discovered my average pace is now a min per km faster than it was 3 weeks ago (still not fast at all tho!) but the pace still feels very easy compared to the spells of flat out running and recovery gasping on interval days!