OK, November may be some way off yet for the Riverside half-marathon, but it’ll come up quick – Alison’s race for life is now only 5 weeks away.

This week I have been running around Warboys, and have now comfortably achieved a 5 mile run…

It’s quite odd running in a place as small as Warboys, as I end up doing multiple laps of the village. At the moment it is 3 laps, which can be quite funny when I see the same people on each lap. My Long Slow Distance runs are at quite a sedate pace of around 9:30 per mile, so I have now started doing the occasional speed work.

On Wednesday I did my first piece of interval training since I transitioned into being able to run continuously. It was a 2 minute running, 2 minute recovery program during which I ran at a gentle jog. The 2 minute runs ended up at a fearsome pace of 7:30 and when I finished I was very, very worn out. This is to the point that I am dreading my next interval run. So, I have decided to go back to the drawing board to make the experience slightly less painful. The main change I am going to make is to make the recovery period a walk, not a run, and to walk until recovered, not to start running again after a fixed time.

I definitely saw the benefit on my next 4 mile run as I managed to pick the pace up to 9:09.

The next change to my program is to make my Sunday runs the long runs, adding on a half-mile per week until I get to the half-marathon distance. Once per week, probably Wednesday will be my interval day and I need to plan how to evolve the intervals as the weeks pass and the final run will be my “easy” run on a Friday, where I’ll run around 4 miles and gently try to push up the pace.