Week 5: Monday - Rolling 500s
Reload
Deload week finished. Didn’t do strength and conditioning yesterday, and in fact have removed it completely from the training plan. That’s how much I hated it last week. Yesterday I did some chores, and then planked for, like, 1 minute and 45 seconds while watching YouTube videos of skateboarders. That’ll do. Now, week 5 starts in the UK but won’t end here.
Rolling 500s
So here’s what Runna had in store for me today.
- 2km warm up no faster than 5:55/km (conversational pace has sped up from 6:05/km)
- 3x:
- 500m @ 5:00/km
- 500m @ 5:50/km
- 1km cool down at “conversational pace (or slower!)”
So that’s 6km in total.
Clocks went back on Sunday morning meaning it’s light at a reasonable time again, for the next couple of weeks at least - good timing as my long run distances start to increase. But let’s not get ahead of myself.
Chose to just run my usual route, no repeat sections in the park or anything. 500 metres is fairly long and besides which, I already learned that these “rolling” workouts don’t go well when I’m pulling 180ยบ at the end of each rep.
Warmup averaged almost dead on 6:00/km (6:07, 5:54). Check me out. Then the 6 rolling reps:
| Instructed | Actual |
|---|---|
| 5:00/km | 4:54/km |
| 5:50/km | 5:38/km |
| 5:00/km | 4:50/km |
| 5:50/km | 5:28/km |
| 5:00/km | 4:44/km |
| 5:50/km | 5:32/km |
Ooops. Not only faster than instructed, but progressively so for the 5 reps. I mean I kinda knew it was happening at the time - same old complaints about can’t run to a particular pace on demand, and if I try and correct I tend to overcorrect and it just gets really messy, but even so I’m surprised I did “worse” on each successive fast rep, getting further away from the correct pace!
I’m surprised by the last roll too, ‘cos I did feel like I’d gone hard and thought I treated that 500 metres as part of a 1.5km cool down, rather than a rep in its own right. As it happens the 1km cool down was at 5:48. Finished by the lake, with lovely autumnal morning views again.
I mean this is all great stuff. I’m dead pleased with myself. One hypothesis I had last month when starting this was that maybe I’m fitter than I think, and just need someone or something to tell me how fast to run, and that seems to be borne out. While I was typing my abridged nonsense into Strava, Runna popped up with an alert.
Do I want to be told to go faster? I’m not certain I do. To be fair, it didn’t automatically change but asked me if I was OK with it.
23:28 would be a 5km PB! I can’t seriously be in 5km PB shape right now – and we’re not going to find out because I’m not going to test it. I took a screenshot but didn’t click either option. Got home, Helen asked how I was, I said “intimidated”. Explained what was going on. She encouraged me to click “Update Pace”… so I did. Eep. I anticipate more demanding demands later in the week.