I'm Going to Try This Again

Jeff Annas 5K 3rd place age group 20:21

Here I am again. I have not posted anything since September of last year. I am going to try and keep up with this now as I have been making great progress in my running so far in the second half of this year. During the first half I was getting little injuries that really did not keep me from running but I wanted to take it easy and not make things worse.

First thing is I had hoped to get under 20 minutes in a 5K race this year, it did not happen. But I did get down to 20:21. I only ran two 5K’s this year (during the last two months) and will only do a total of four races by December. So I think reaching 20:21 is great and I am very confident I will get under the 20 minute mark next year.

My strength training has been going great, getting stronger in my upper and lower body and midsection. This is something every runner should be working on, especially us older ones. Right now I mostly work out 6 days a week. An example would be chest and back day one, arms and shoulders day two then legs day three and repeat over the next three days. Day seven is rest day. I change this up and vary the exercises every week.

What has helped me get faster, aside from trying to increase mileage, is speed work. Before I started my speed work I did four sessions of hill sprints over three weeks leading up to this point just to get broken in. For my 5K’s I did workouts twice a week for the three weeks before the races. Things like mile repeats, ¼ mile repeats and 20 min tempo runs. The week before the race I cut my mileage, did 6 quarter mile repeats on Monday and 6 - 200 meter repeats on Wednesday before the weekend races.

I can only run 5 days a week because of my work schedule. This is good because it forces me to not run two days which gives me some time to recover.

Up coming races for 2015 are a 10 miler in October and Half Marathon in December. The day I run the Half Marathon will be one day after my 60^th Birthday. For the beginning of 2016 I would like o do a 10k, 10 Miler then a 50K in that order.