Sun Run training schedule – 2008
Just a note that the $30 early bird registration for the 2008 Sun Run closes at the end of the month – after it will be $35.
I noticed that to access the Learn to Run 10k schedule on Sport Med BC has been put behind a stupid system where you have to register in order to access the information. In addition, once you get in, the way that they let you access the information is convoluted and is generally much more annoying than what they had previously. The people that did their site redesign should be fired since it is now utterly unusable.
So to save people a bunch of time, I put the information in a spreadsheet and then paced it out with a three-day-a-week schedule leading up to the April 20 Sun Run. I started training earlier in advance (started in the middle of December), but this schedule worked fairly well for me in 2006 and 2007.
To read the non-regular run schedules, “10r-1w-15r-1w-20r-1w-10r” would be translated as “Run 10 minutes, walk one minute, run 15 minutes, walk one minute, run 20 minutes, walk one minute, run 10 minutes”. The rest of it is quite intuitive. Note that there is a four day gap between the last training run and the Sun Run, so perhaps you might want to include a short 25 minute run or something so your muscles don’t atrophy. Optionally, just re-scheduling it so that the last two training days are three days apart will also do the trick.
One should have a pretty good idea in March (specifically after the March 17 run) whether you’ll be able to do 10km better or worse than an hour. My last time was 57 minutes and 8 seconds, and my goal is to beat this time. In order to do this I need to be able to run faster than 10.6km/h continuously for 57 minutes. In practice this never happens – I really need to be running 11.5km/h for about 48 minutes and walk at 6km/h for 9 minutes. This should be able to beat 57 minutes. I particularly like scheduling in the bulk of walking when climbing up to the Burrard Street Bridge. After reaching the crest of the bridge, running faster than 11.5km/h is easy and it’s also motivating to blast by people in the process.
I’ve also been able to fine-tune my running speeds with the assistance of a treadmill. I never used treadmills until last December and I found it fairly interesting to see how physically taxing running at certain speeds are. I believe my “steady state” speed will be around 6.8 miles per hour (10.9 km/h), but I want to get this higher to allow for some walking time during the race.
Tags: sun run