"There's only one hard and fast rule in running: sometimes you have to run one hard and fast."








Monday, January 23, 2012

Progress and Perspective

I've had three good weeks of training these first three weeks of the year and I've been feeling pretty good about the rapid progress I'm making. Here's the 5K race comparables:

21:54 January 1
21:08 January 8
20:55 January 15
19:31 January 22

That's some impressive improvement!

Then I put it into context:

18:06 me in 2006
17:04 me in 2000
16:54 MN over-50 indoor record
16:17 MN over-50 road record (for MN native)
15:51 MN over-50 road record (by an out-stater)
15:41.6 US over-50 track record
15:36 US over-50 road record
15:28 me in 1985
14:53.2 world over-50 record

Still, if I keep taking off a minute per week, I'll have the world record in March!

8 comments:

Karen said...

That is impressive! What's your secret?

Colin said...

Your recent training has been solid; nicely done!

Call me old fashioned, though, but I'm not going to accept your "5K race comparable" times until you produce a real race time! Not saying that your guesstimates aren't accurate, but without supporting evidence I'm going to digest them with a large grain of salt ...

Glaven Q. Heisenberg said...

I'd be embarrassed to admit in public that I was that slow.

Those are mile times, right, old man?

SteveQ said...

@Karen: Be a good 5K runner, but run ultras instead. Get asthma. Decide to start training for shorter races, get healthier, go from running in cold weather to running indoors.

@Colin: Obviously, I'm just having fun with numbers. I don't think I'll have a real 5K until maybe Brian Kraft.

Colin said...

Steve, for what it's worth according to this WAVA age grading calculator your 18:06 in '06 would be equivalent to an 18:58 this year, and your 17:04 in '00 would be equivalent to 18:43 now. So by that measure sub-19 would be your best 5K performance in at least 6 years, and 6:00 pace for 5K would be your best performance for at least 12. I'd say either would be a huge accomplishment!

joyRuN said...

For additional perspective, I would totally KILL for your 5k times.

Kill as in crush someone's head between my ginormous crossfit quads.

joyRuN said...

PS - tag you're it.

Ross said...

Bad workout? Hmmm...I guess I need to try to get a few of these bad workouts in myself.