Tempo vs Interval?

Well, this has been a busy week. I did an easy 3.5 miles on Monday as my legs were so tired from the hard training over the weekend. It's not often I do easy runs, so it felt a bit strange, but I definitely needed it.

Tuesday I took little madam up to the athletics track and we ran a bit together until she complained her legs were tired so we jogged back home again. The dog had fun!

Wednesday I did 1.5 miles to the opticians and then a 10.5 mile long run averaging 8:37 min/mile which I was pleased with as this is the longest I have been able to run for quite a while. My legs were definitely tired at the end though although my heartrate was good.

Thursday was a very much needed rest day. My knees were quite sore and I was worried that they were going to get really bad again. Keeping my fingers crossed that they will be okay.

Friday I did a tempo run and apart from the hills that slowed me down (along with my legs still being tired from Wednesday), I didn't do too badly and managed an average pace of 7:48 min/mile on the three miles tempo bit.

I did do quite a bit of research on effective training techniques this week and there is so much conflicting advice! I had read on Runner's World that tempo sessions were the most important type of session as it trained your body to run at the pace you needed to achieve in a race. So I had planned a weekly tempo session into my calendar. Then I found some more interesting research from a sport journal. The author was citing research that showed that interval training was actually better at improving your speed even though this meant less mileage during the week. They gave several different sessions to try so I have programmed them into my Garmin ready for use.

At the moment I don't feel like I am running 10k at the speed I could achieve so with two 10ks before the half marathon, I am trying to focus on that while still incorporating a weekly long run to build my endurance. One thing my Garmin is doing is making sure that every run has a focus rather than just running to cover miles which is probably what I was doing before.

I have also done some research on hill running and tried to use a different technique on the hills I encountered on my long run. What a difference! I followed the advice and kept myself upright while shortening my stride and my pace, although slowed, was not as slow as it has been when I have been running hills before. I felt more like my legs were doing the work, so I intend to keep this up and make sure they are stronger. I still dread hills at the moment. I need to love them. Hmm, bit more work needed on that yet!

I cancelled my session yesterday as I was just too tired... Today I did a 4 x 1200m interval session at 5k pace. Well, I say 5k pace, but I found it difficult to run that slowly over a shorter distance. It just didn't feel like a hard workout and my heart rate showed that. I know how important it is to keep to the right pace so you don't deplete your resources, so I will have to work on this and keep the faster paces for the shorter distances at the moment.

Well I will keep researching this week and see what else I can find to help me achieve even better times. A new pb in June? Maybe...