Within the last couple of months, I've become more competitive about my running time. I generally run 3 to 4 times a week for 3 to 8 miles per run. My time usually averages 8 minutes 30 seconds per mile give or take about 20 seconds. I want to continue to improve on my time, but for the last 6 weeks I've peaked. Does anyone have advice on bring down the running time.
I made some progress by taking just a few weeks to change up what I was running. At the time I ran Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, so I decided to make Mondays and Wednesdays "speed-work:" suicide sprints, lunges, invisible chair, half-mile sprints... the idea being to build up the "go" muscles. Then on Friday I would do a ten miler, for the endurance.
I found this pattern most helpful if I did it once in a while, for something different to wake up my system. Might help you bust through this plateau. At my best, I was running my three mile shy of nineteen minutes, so never great, but better than I can do now.
Plyometrics (explosive movements) have done wonders for me. You can do a search for some exercises that you can start off with.
Building up your base mileage will also help you get faster as well as adding in some intervals at your goal race/time trial pace.
Check out www.mcmillanrunning.com, there's a calculator there where you can enter your fastest time for a distance, and it'll lay out how fast you could potentially run at other distances as well as target paces for speed work outs.
The important thing is to set a goal, do some research on how to achieve that goal, and then get out there and do it.
