Interval Suggestions
 

My wife wants to get faster for a 5k at the beginning of August. She has a pretty good training base. Not huge miles but about 20 miles a week for the past two years. Very consistent. She also swims at least one day a week.

Today she did a treadmill 5k in 28 flat. She said she ran hard but not maximal effort. She has never done any speed work. Any suggestions in terms of some interval work to help her bring here 5k time down? distances? reps? speed relative to her current 5k pace?

Once again, Coach Higdon has your answer. Just be sure she doesn't go overboard and do every training run hard. Intervals should be limited to once a week at most to ensure proper recovery. Throwing in some fartleks at slightly less than race pace on weekends probably wouldn't hurt though.

http://www.halhigdon.com/5K%20Training/5-Kinter.htm

Thanks Runnercoug. Looks like a nice approach. I have run lots of intervals back in high school but I think my high school track coach was interval crazy. Our interval volume and frequency I think were quite high so I was at a loss for the appropriate volume for here. I suspect the volume and frequency was too high for me back in the day because every year I ran my times would start to increase after about 1/3 to 1/2 of the season was over.

There are different theories for racers and elite runners when compared to weekend warriors.

Roger Bannister broke the four minute barrier while attending med school, but he made every single workout an interval workout. If there were one way to make me hate running, it would be to make me run every single workout as intervals.

But for us weekenders, we need proper rest.

Agreed. I didn't mean to suggest that some people on the team didn't benefit from high interval volume. But I do not think I did. Even in High school I was fairly muscular for a middle distance runner (mostly the 800). I think the kind of volume we did was hard on a bigger runner like me. I would lose weight throughout the season (for example about 185 to about 175 my junior year) but I also got slower. At the time it just got me frustrated. But looking back its hard to imagine that it wasn't overtraining.

High school coaches are notoriously bad track coaches. Most of the better high school aged track athletes rely upon a club coach, because athletes need tailored workouts, and high school coaches are often too lazy to go into that level of detail. Our local high school coach is awful, because he's too easy. He claims if he made it harder he'd have fewer athletes, to which I point out, do you want a few committed athletes who will score or a bunch who don't score?

It can be a tough balance to find, and it's different for everyone. I think most coaches would rather have a slightly under trained runner than an over trained one, though. From my perspective, a typical average runner who has to live a real life of jobs, kids, spouses, etc, really won't benefit from speed work more than once or at the most, twice a week. It's just too much.