Transcription
I genuinely believe that the 5K is probably one of the hardest events to train for, not just from a "you need to get very specific" perspective because it takes a very specific fitness on race day and a very specific preparation on race day to get the best out of yourself.
But also because it's right in between being pretty quick, like the shorter events, you know, 800, 1500, but also requires a bloody good engine and a bloody good endurance, like some of the other events. So, it has the physical difficulties that come around when you're doing the shorter events, you know, that feeling the body stiffening up, you have to get physical legs, arms, etc. But then it also has that, it's long enough to be psychologically quite tough, especially if you're not well prepared. And then it also has the demands of, you need a bloody good base and a bloody good fitness to race a good 5K.
What I want to achieve in this video is to make sure that with the training that you're doing, you're doing the training that's going to maximize your chances on race day, to get the most out of your fitness, to get the most out of your body. And what that means is you roughly run 5K, if you're well trained, at around about 90% of your V2 Max, okay? And so, if we can not only improve your V2 Max, which would then improve PBs, but if by doing some very specific sessions, if we can improve how long you can sustain V2 Max effort, therefore pushing the percentage of V2 Max that you're going to race on race day, you're going to race with a higher speed at V2. But you're also going to race in a way that allows you to extract more out of your body.
Because if by the end of this sort of training plan, you can run at 90% of that V2 Max PB, that's not improved, instead of 75 to 80% because you weren't doing the specific work, well, that's a very simple calculation that you'll rip your 5K PB to shreds. Let's look at my 5K PB. 2023, I targeted Morton Games 5K in Dublin. I ran 13:48 for 5K. I came off a marathon buildup, and I always think it's super important for marathon runners to get stuck back into some track stuff, some shorter distances, and see it as skill development, but also from a physiological perspective, V2 Max development, etc. It's bloody important. But see it as the best thing that you can do during perhaps your downtime between marathons. If you find yourself bouncing from marathon to marathon, it's likely that you'll plateau, even in your marathon results. Irrelevant to 5K, so when I did the 13:48, it's no surprise that then three, four months later, you run your second best marathon of your career, 2:11 at Dublin. All that good work that you do for 5K will pay off for the longer distances as well.
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Looking at the event itself, what does it actually take? What's the demands of a bloody good 5K? So obviously, it's not the same volume as a marathon or a half marathon, and you're probably going to be in the ballpark of 15 to 25 to 30 minutes. It's a good effort, but it's right at that sort of close enough to V2 Max effort, that that's why I'm rhyming on about this V2 Max. But what you really need to do is get your V2 Max to the best place possible. And like I've already gone over a thousand bloody times, you get bored of me saying it, for how long can you sustain that V2 Max effort?
Why that becomes really important is because, let's say for example, your V2 Max is 65 or even 60, but at that moment in time, that doesn't mean that you can hold that for 10 or 11 minutes. When you're well trained, you can hold your V2 Max for 10 or 11 minutes. It's not given, it's earned. So, if you can hold your 60 V2 Max for, you know, 11 minutes, well then it's likely that if you're going to aim for, let's say, 20 minutes or 18 minutes in your 5K, it's likely that for 11 minutes, you can sustain about 90% of V2 Max. But if you have a V2 Max of 60, but you're not doing much V2 Max in training, and you can only currently hold it for four minutes, well, you might not be able to run at 90% of that V2 Max. You might have to run at a much lower percentage to stretch it to 20.
So, we're not only trying to improve V2 Max, because with improvement, the V2 Max will come a faster pace at V2 Max. We're also trying to work on how long you can sustain that sort of V2 Max effort. Which means the longer you can sustain V2 Max effort via good training, the higher your percentage of V2 Max you'll be able to race in the 5K. That is the why.
Let me make that a bit more simple. Let's take two athletes, Athlete A, Athlete B. They both run 16 minutes for 5K, okay? But let's pretend that Athlete A is a much better all-round, well-trained athlete, okay? That means the recovery stuff's really good, their volume per week, you know, how much mileage they run, pretty good, maybe plus some cross-training, their sleep's really good, they do really good sort of threshold training, some really great long runs, they also add in their zone two steady days. In other words, a very all-round great athlete. But because they lack V2 Max training, because they haven't progressed some of those V2 Max sessions, they can't run at V2 Max for as long as Athlete B can, okay? So on race day, they run at, pretend, 80% of their V2 Max. They're still running as hard as they can, but because they didn't do the specific work, they can only possibly run at 80% of their V2 Max.
Then, when we look at Athlete B, not as well trained from a general perspective. So general fitness isn't in as good a place. Probably, if they raced a 10K or a half marathon or a marathon, Athlete B is going to be very exposed. Long runs aren't as good, steady days aren't as good, in fact, don't do steady days, recovery stuff not as good. But what they did do a bloody good job of was making sure they did five or six very specific sessions towards this bloody 5K. Not only that, they did a 3K race 10 days before. And so on race day, they were able to run at 92%, let's say in this scenario, that extracts more out of their body than Athlete A. Athlete A was fitter, but the race result was the exact same because Athlete B could run at a higher percentage of V2 Max.
That means that on race day, in a 5K, if you haven't trained the specific stuff, you might actually be not hitting that full potential. You might be getting beat by people that aren't sort of as fit as you, but they're better trained for the 5K. So, how do we bridge that gap? How do we bring it all together that you have not only the, you know, the good general fitness, Athlete A probably has the better potential at this point, but if they don't get stuck into some of that specific stuff, they won't pull the best result out of themselves on race day.
So, let's get into the specifics. So looking at the specifics, we're really talking about how do we develop a V2 Max. And you might start, depending on your level of development or if you've been doing V2 Max training or not, you might start with 10 times 60 seconds. You can even do it on grass or uphill to get rid of some of the pounding, and you can take between 75 to 90 seconds rest. That means that you're looking at about 10 minutes of 5K effort training, okay? You can go for 5K PBs. It conditions a lot. Track, road, firm grass, perhaps you'll be able to run at that sort of 5K pace and keep the effort in the right place. Don't force it if it's windy or it's a wet grass field, etc. It's all about effort for now.
Then, how you can develop that at that moment in time when you've done that sort of first session, think of it is, I could probably now hold this pace or this effort or V2 Max for four to five minutes, but I need to make that longer. We're trying to push that to 10 or 11 minutes. Then, what you might do is you might take that session to 12 minutes, 14 minutes, all the way up to perhaps 20 minutes. You can progress this probably once a week, or perhaps even every 10 days. It depends how much time you have before your goal race. You want about five or six of these sessions, and that's what's going to get you to be able to run for 11 minutes, 10, 11 minutes at V2 Max effort from four.
These can progress to 6 times 2 minutes at that sort of 5K effort, 6 times 2 minutes with 90 seconds rest. When you can progress that to, let's say, 5 times 3 minutes or 4 times 4 minutes, you can see where this is going. You can also stick at the start with the 10 times 60 seconds, but instead of 75 seconds rest, take 60, but try to maintain that same pace that you were able to run maybe a week before or two weeks before at that sort of 5K effort or 5K pace. So long as you're training in that same place, whether it's a grass field, road loop, track, etc., try to keep things the same so that you can see progression.
But we're trying to progress how much volume that we're doing at that 5K effort, which means we're going from 10 minutes in that first session, hopefully up to 20 minutes. But then we're also trying to increase the length of time per interval that we're spending at that V2 Max effort. So maybe from one minute week one, maybe all the way up to three or four minutes by week four or five. In doing this, we're improving V2 Max pace at V2 Max, how long we can run at V2 Max. This is why we're maximizing what you're going to pull out of your body on the 5K race day.
It's also beneficial to plan perhaps a 3K race or maybe a 2K time trial with about 10 to 12 days to go. That gives you a real good stimulus and a real little teaser of what's to come. So on race day, it's not a big shock to the body or the psychology. When you get stuck into race day, so that's a really nice development. And then with eight or nine days to go, you fall back to your taper. That means during race week, perhaps on the Tuesday, you might only do six minutes of sort of V2 Max effort, and you might only do like 45 seconds in terms of the interval length. Nothing that's going to take away from the race result that weekend.
So that's what you want to do with that 5K buildup. Work on your specifics. Keep your general stuff in a great place. Don't neglect gym. Don't neglect sleep. Get your lifestyle in a bloody good place. Joggingroom.com has everything you need to know about everything you'd ever have to do to be a better athlete with your nutrition, your sleep, your psychology, your gym stuff. Check it out if you like. There's lots of free stuff on there. There's also training plans on there. I hope you got something from this video. If you do, go and do some of this stuff. Maybe comment below, let me know how you get on, or even just comment below if there's other topics you'd like for me to explore. And take care.