Am I on track? (Read 570 times)

You appear to be progressing quickly, but I doubt that you can break 18:00 with less than 6 months under your belt. you can try, but I attempted a similar feat when I first started, and became injured very quickly. If you don't give up, it is likely that you can reach your goal within a year to a year and a half. My advice would be: 1. Don't overtrain 2. Remain consistant( don't go from 20 miles a week to 65) 3. Take advice, but don't let anyone tell you that you can't reach your goals( including me)

No, I have not run anything yet. And I just started with speedwork. I was planning to do some race end of march, just to see where I stand. May I be will do longer intervals next week, so I will se how much my speed drops with distance. I don't keep my logs here, they are on my computer (I use Foreunner 305 software)

I don't keep my logs here, they are on my computer (I use Foreunner 305 software)

It takes me about 10 seconds to enter my distance and time each day - it's not a big deal, and you would get a lot of good feedback that way. It's worth the effort, IMO.

Hopefully, not a sacrifice that will need to be made for much longer, the GPS import tool Eric is working on should take care of that -brian

It’s really impossible to tell by treadmill workouts. For one thing some of them aren’t that accurate so far as pace, and even if you’d run these workouts on a track or the roads it would still be a guess as to what you could do in a race. The best way to find out is to go run a 5k. It should be relatively easy to find one. If you can duplicate your treadmill times on a track I would say that you clearly have the speed for your 5k goal. The half marathon is a different story, which brings me to your “am I on track?” question. Not to be harsh, but I think you are going about this the wrong way. Judging by what you’ve said thus far you have hardly any mileage base and are doing intervals. You are going to need to run more miles—a lot more, even for the 5k. The intervals will be next to worthless without them. You would do well to pick up a good book on training and read it. The next thing would be to go out and race a 5k to establish a benchmark for basing your training paces on. Getting back to the half marathon, there are lots of people who can run a resasonably fast 5k but have times that become poorer with each step up in distance. In the great majority of the cases it is because of an inadequate mileage base, but there are sometimes other factors such as muscle fiber makeup and body weight. Take Michael “tschepsit”, for example. He has an 18:06 for the 5k, but only 1:35 for the half marathon. Judging by that time and the other longer races, this looks like a classic case of low mileage base. Michael is a full minute faster at 5k than a guy like me, which is huge for that distance, yet I ran my last HM in 1:26:33. If Michael had run the same number of miles I have in the past year, he’d probably be running low 1:20’s or faster for HM by now and his 5k would be in 17’s. I’d estimate that at least 90% of the people I see posting in the various forums here on RunningAhead do not run enough training mileage to come anywhere close to their potential, yet the single most important thing a runner can do to improve is to run more mileage. I’ve seen “Goals for 2008” threads were people say things like “I want to run 1200 miles for the year and complete 2 marathons.” That’s absurd…1200 miles isn’t enough to run a decent 5k, let alone a marathon. It’s only 23 miles a week, for god's sake. Welcome to the new melenium. Ok, I’m rambling…enough for now; I think you get my point. Good luck.