At this weekend’s London Grand Prix, Mo Farah was aiming to break Dave Moorcroft’s long-held British 5000m record. Moorcroft had a successful background in middle distance running, winning the 1500m at the Commonwealth Games. However, the British abundance of talent in these events in the early 80s led him to move up to 5000m. On a balmy night in Oslo in 1982, Moorcroft smashed the world record and almost ran the first sub 13 minute 5000m.
And he still holds the British record 27 years later – why?
To run a world class 5k, you need speed. At world record pace, the runners are almost running at 4 minute mile pace – for over 3 miles!! To enable them to maintain such a pace, they also have to be capable of running very economically and to have a very high lactate threshold speed.
So how does this relate to training for club athletes?
For most club runners, the 5k is at the short end of their range of distances. In order to prepare to race, you need to include sessions at current and goal 5k pace. If you haven’t recently run a 5k, you could convert another recent race time over a longer distance to give you an idea of goal time. However, many road runners’ times do not convert particularly well over shorter distances so an ideal session to gain an idea of your likely race time is one devised by Babineau and Leger, two Canadians. When rested and following a thorough warm up, run 3 x 1600m intervals at the fastest consistent speed you can manage throughout the three. You take one minute recovery between each interval. The average time of the three intervals will be your pace for the 5k.
Another session that Babineau and Leger experimented with was 12 x 400m with 15 seconds rest. They found that the average speed during this session was 3.7% faster than 5k speed. The lactate levels generated with this session were much the same as in a 5k race and as the pace is slightly faster than race pace, it is a great session for improving race speed.
The great thing about 5k racing is that you do not need the recovery time of longer races. After building up your endurance through training and racing a marathon, spending a month training for 5k races will enable you to build speed and maximise the endurance gains you’ve made.
Train SMART!