More running around the track


I’m by far the slowest in my group at the track. Today, the others were aiming for 1:36 laps or better, whereas I knew I’d be lucky to put in a consistent set of 1:40s. However, as long as I’m content with that, or at least don’t go crazy in the first couple of laps and then blow up, I can still end up happy.

Today we had a beast of a session: 15 minutes without a break, then 3 minutes rest, then 10 minutes, then 2 minutes rest, then 5 more minutes, with all those segments run at the same pace – probably around 10k pace.

It turned out to be easier than last week’s 3×10 minutes – probably because once you’ve done the 15 minute segment, everything else seems incredibly short. I miscounted laps or time on the first segment, but that was also good – when I checked my watch, thinking we were only 10 minutes in, we were at 13:30 and I had one lap left before I could stop for a bit. My individual lap times were a bit up and down (I always seem to do the back straight faster than the last two parts of each lap) but overall I kept hitting the same target time, so that was nice.

The problem is, I want to be able to do a 20 minute 5k. If I’m running a consistent 1:40 per lap, that’s 4:10 per km, which is a consistent 20:50 5k. To get down to 20 minutes I have to take 4 seconds out of every lap, and although that’s easy for the first few, keeping everything to 1:36 is going to be a real struggle.

After 30 minutes of hard exercise, we ceased, and on the way back stopped for a couple of beers. There’s a couple of bars just by the MRT station, and perhaps unwisely I had two pints of beer which somebody else bought for me. That’s a debt for the future that I need to pay. I got home late, about 11pm, and then had to call my wife, before going and weighing myself. I think it was the beer, but this was the first time I’ve ever weighed more after going to the track, than when I started. The thing to do is to leave the air con off all night and sweat the booze out, but that may be a cure that’s worse than the disease.

1:38.73
1:41.42
1:40.28
1:38.95
1:40.50
1:41.92
1:41.58
1:43.25
1:38.72

So the first 15 minutes was a bit slower than I thought – 3 laps faster than planned, and the rest slower, although not far off plan.

1:39.15
1:41.35
1:40.11
1:42.36
1:41.95
1:37.58

Fresh after the start, I ran these quite slow, but with a bit of a kick at the end.

1:37.42
1:44.25
1:35.70

Then my two fastest laps were at the end. That suggests maybe I could have gone a bit faster earlier, but also there’s still some more consistency to work on here (more 5k workouts? or more longer stuff to build up the base of my stamina?) before I can really attempt a sub-20 5k. It’ll come, it’s just a matter of having the patience to know when.


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