Making friends with pace not a pace maker

This week I am looking at pace.  To me one the great mysteries of running.  In the early days I naively thought that all you needed to do was to just go out and run.  To a large extent that is true and always will be. But what I had not counted on was that after a while 'just running' was not going to be satisfying enough for me.  I wanted to get faster and stronger and in paticular faster.

However with much of my running I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do but quite often very little time actually putting it into action.  This week however is different.  This week is my week for speed, well pace really.

I have built in two speed sessions , one on Thursday as part of my easy run and then one with the training group on Saturday.  Speed training is all about understanding your pace and understanding how to build up strength to run at your race pace. To do that successfully you must learn how to run for short extended periods at your race pace then dial back and run at a slightly slower pace.

There are two ways to speed train - one is laps on a track at pace race and just under, and the other is hills - running them.