For many runners, winter is the time of aerobic maintenance. The cold weather and sloppy conditions cause us to slow down and just put in the km.
Trudging long and slow through the winter certainly is not that bad. Such arduous work-outs develop slow-twitch muscle fibres, enhance your ability to burn fat and improve endurance.
But If you hope to regain your pre-winter form, you need to start adding tempo runs and a combo of short and long intervals into the training mix.
As you work in tempo runs, you'll build on the aerobic benefits you accrued over the winter and boost cardiac muscle development.
Through a combination of long and short intervals, you'll develop the fast-twitch muscle fibres that were largely ignored over the past few months, and you'll increase your ability to buffer lactic acid, allowing you to run faster, longer without fatiguing.
Since it's difficult to jump right from slow aerobic runs into speedwork, try the 3 following work-outs (add one or two of them per week) to transition from winter slog to spring speed.
a) 5-4-3-2-1
In this hybrid work-out, your pace picks up while the length of time you run fast decreases. Warm up with an easy 2-3 km, then run a little faster than tempo pace (about 20 s slower than 5K pace) for 5 minutes. Recover with 5 easy minutes. Then proceed down the ladder, gradually picking up the pace of the faster segments and recovering with an equal number of minutes of jogging.
b) progressive tempo
Rather than hammering a tempo-run pace for 25 minutes, ease into it. After 10 to 15 minutes warm-up, run the first 5 minutes at slightly faster than easy-run pace, then pick up the pace slightly every 5 minutes. Arrive at your normal comfortable/hard tempo pace only in the last 5 minutes segment.
c) 400 m with double recovery
After warming up, run 6 to 8 400m-repeats with each slightly faster than 5K race pace, but instead of 90s to 2 minutes of recovery, give yourself some extra rest by jogging 3 to 4 minutes between each effort.
City-Pier-City coming up
This year again, the City-Pier-City will offer you a nice tour in your city, which will be free of car on this special occasion. Ole Nielson has kindly drawn the track on google earth. If you want to have a virtual tour on the track, follow this link .
A form will be hung on the information board at the sport centre (downstairs) for those wanting to create a meeting-point at the CPC with other EPO runners.
