I am planning to run 3-5 5Ks this year.

AmoresPerros, you ran a bunch of races already, way to go man!

No particular plan. I've run 9 so far, I think from a brief log review, but some were trails I think.

I am hoping to improve my 5K to as close to 20:00 as possible this year. Current ability is 23:59. So I guess a 5k every 2 months or so. Next one definitely aim at 22x. I might be overly ambitious, but we shall see

I use to enter some sort of race just about every weekend and my times continue to come down but seem to be leveling off. I started at 29:00 for 5K about 16 months ago. Now I am at 22:45 but it is harder to knock more and more time off. seems like just a few seconds each race. I dont think i can reduce my time by 1-2 minutes more without increasing my weekly mileage to around 35-40 mpw and speed work. Currently i run 25 mpw and the races were my speed work. So far this year I have run about 8 races (4- 5K, 3-10K, 1-15K) I am finding that racing every weekend is too hard on my body. It is pretty high intensity and i need to recover for a day or 2 and thus my weekly mileage tends to drop. i think the elites are correct that you should target specific races and train to them to get really good.

I will run one this comming week. Another in July another in September and 2 in October. I guess that's not very many. But maybe if I keep them spread out I can keep my PR streak going. I hope to take off at least 30 seconds on the next one.

That's a *huge* improvement, in my mind. Best of luck.

sadly enough I just realized that I have not run a 5K since last July when I broke 20 mins. Partially because I was afraid that if I ran another I would be disappointed if I didnt break 20 again and partially because I was in marathon training all last year. This year - aside from having busy weekends (especially Saturdays when all the 5Ks seem to be) I dont really have any excuses. I still plan to run 5-6 this year, I just have to find them and fit them into my schedule.

That's a *huge* improvement, in my mind. Best of luck.

 

I ended up taking off 1:26 in fact.  Much better than the 30 seconds I was setting as a minimum goal.  Now it will be harder but the next race I need to drop at least 8 more seconds.  That 21:07 I had this morning is just tempting me to break 21:00. 

 

When you don't run in the 18's the big gains are out there to be had.  Even so I think that was my last huge time drop.  It will be a lot slower from this point forward.