This week was a fairly easy taper week for my first race of 2014, a cold 5k.
I don’t taper how most runners traditionally do, which it seems is lowered volume & lowered intensity.
The previous months have been general training, as I’ve been stuck indoors. Usually a weekly tempo run, a weekly longer run, and more steady state runs in between. The workouts from the last week are below:
Saturday
warm up, 25min tempo run, cool down
Sunday
warm up, MOD50, 40 @ aerobic threshold, cool down
Monday
Off
Tuesday
Warm up, 30min fartlek, cool down
Wednesday
EZ50
Thursday
20 minute warm up, reps of 600m to 100m at 5k goal pace (3:30 / km) with equal distance jogging. No cool down.
Friday
Nothing special today. I did a 15 minute warmup followed by a 15 minute fartlek with accelerations ranging from 25m to 300m.
Saturday
4k warm up, 5k in 17:32, 3k cool down
I’m of course happy with the 9 second PR, however I’m a bit disappointed that I won by something like 5 minutes! I drove an hour to this race in hopes of having at least 1 other person close to my fitness level, to help push me along. The temp was a cold 13 degrees and my tights actually had crotch frost at the end! My motivation was quite low, and the 4th kilometer was primarily uphill and into the wind, making it possibly the slowest kilometer I’ve run in a 5k race in the last year. Next up is the Scotty Roberts 5k in 6 weeks, judging from previous results there should be a couple people close to my fitness level at the run!
Only once a week do I generally drink caffeine. Before my 5k I drank this “instant latte” from Starbucks. Drinking caffeinated coffee only once a week before a hard really definitely makes a big difference! After my race and hard workouts I drink a couple cups of soy/almond milk with a scoop of a greens powder.
