Attempting a 5k Personal Best
18 Jul 2024 - Andrew Landau
I’ve been a 5k runner basically my whole running career. Sure, I spent a few years “running” as a soccer player in middle school, but since I started formal running training as a 13 year old freshman on the Wootton High School XC team, I’ve been racing the 5k.
The 5k is such a great racing distance - it requires speed and endurance. It requires persistence and grit, but also explosivity. Since it’s a bit longer, it’s slower than a sprint, which means that the initial pace feels like flying - very fast but not too hard. But then it just keeps going, and going… and going. I heard someone say that finishing your best 5k shouldn’t feel like a kick, but a prolonged squeeze, and boy is that accurate. When I race a successful 5k, I feel like I’ve truly given everything I possibly can.
My racing history
When I was in high school, my PB was an 18:54. I set it during my sophomore year on a magical day at the Glory Days invitational where my entire team set huge PBs. I don’t know if it was because of our training, the weather, or just something in the air, but I think I ran my fastest mile, 2 mile and 5k on that day. I never ran fasterExcuse time: I put a lot more focus into music in my last 2 years, I was a saxophonist and ended up going to a music conservatory for college, so I guess that’s a pretty good reason. as a HS student, but did manage to break 19 again a few more times.
My running slowed downquite literally… in college, but when I got to graduate school in Boston it picked up again and I started routinely racing the Cambridge Classic 5k series. I quickly brought my time down to the 19 minute range, and eventually was able to set a new PB of aroundthe actual time is lost to the pre-historical era before I used strava :( 18:45. Hell yeah!
After the pandemic, my training became even more serious as I’ve become more of an Ultra runner and started to focus on long distance running. That being said, speed work is still critical, and, as I mentioned, I love the 5k. So I’ve continued training at this distance as a way to work on my top-end speed and simply because I want to.
My training has paid off. In the past year I’ve set two new PBs! Last year at the Regents Park 5k, I set a new PB of 18:24 (chip-time). That was awesome. Then, about a year later, I did even betterbut I went out for drinks with my lab the night before (which was stupid) so I think I could have gone even faster (I think) and brought it down to 18:21 as a time trial in Victoria Park.
I want to run a sub 18 minute 5k
Anyone who’s a runner can see where this is going. The great thing about running is that progress is extremely measurable, you can simply time how long it takes to run a certain distance. If it takes less time than your last attempt, you’ve gotten faster. So for the last few years I’ve had my eye on a goal I never thought I’d achieve when I was younger - a sub 18 minute 5k. Running 5 kilometers in less than 18 minutes is equivalent to running 3.1 miles at 5:48 minutes per mile (3:36 minutes per kilometer). That’s fast. Not olympic fast or professional fast or even varsity high school student fast, but fast for me. And that’s what counts. I want to get faster and stronger, and I know I can do thiswith “this” just being a stepping stone to the next goal, and the next goal, and the next goal (and that’s one of the great things about running).
So, interspersed with my training blocks that are more focused on ultras, I’ve been mixing in some blocks dedicated to improving my 5k fitness. What does that mean in practice? A strong 5k physiology requires you to be able to run very fast at vO2 max (also known as velocity at vO2 max) and to be able to hold ~90% of vO2 max effort for about 20 minutes (or 18 minutes if I succeed).
That means that two race-specific workouts are needed in the 4-6 weeks approaching the event:
- Top-end speed work (hill sprints, short and fast efforts like tabatas or 400m intervals)
- vO2 max endurance work (intervals of increasing duration at or near vO2 effort).
My key session was heading to the track and doing 1k repeats at a bit faster than my target race-pace. A week and a half before my time trial, I did 5 x 1k repeats, where the first four were at about 3:33 and the last was at 3:36. That’s great! That’s a little faster than target pace (3:36), and I could hold it for 5 of them, which is the cumulative distance I was going to need to run on the event. Along with progress at some other workouts (specifically thresholds and hill sprints), I felt like I was as ready as I can be to break 18 minutes.
And then life happened…
Setting a new PB is an amazing achievement, and that also means it takes a lot of work and effort. Things sort of have to go right for it to work out. If things go wrong and you still reach your goal, then maybe it wasn’t really that good of a goal to begin with and you should’ve shot even higher. And boy did things go sideways for this one. In the weeks leading up to the event, my plan was to train hard, do a few big running events (including a 50k training run and a 16 milesuccessful :) FKT attempt as a Z2/3 tempo run), and focus on optimizing the taper so that I can be at my best for the 5k time trial.
Nailing a taper doesn’t just mean taking it a bit easier on my feet in the days before racing, it also means taking care of my body and limiting stress. But - I’m headed away to a course for 6 weeks on Monday (which means I’m working hard at home and my job to finish everything and leave it in a good place before taking off), and, to make it a double whammy, our landlords decided to break our lease just 2 weeks before the time trial, so my partner and I had to spend two frantic weeks biking all over London to find a new place before I leave the country. Talk about high-stress!
They say that the three biggest life stressors are when you change your job, change your house, and change your partner, and I was effectively in the middle of the first two of those changes while trying to set a 5k PB. Not ideal. So, I did what I could, tried to optimize what was in my control (food, sleep, running taper, etc), and set my mind towards doing the best I can on the day I was planning on setting a new PB (this morning, as I’m writing this).
The time trial
As usual for track workouts, my partnerwho was doing the TT with me and I headed to the Paddington Recreation Ground and geared ourselves up for a time trial. The time trial started out great. I felt spring to my step, the first 200m section was about 3 seconds too fast but felt relaxed (40s rather than 43ish), and I was locked in to my pace after a bit of initial excitement (see the graph below).
My legs felt great the whole time actually. But cardiovascularly? That’s another story. After 1.5ks, it started to feel very hard. My breathing was so intense that I was worried some of the other people at the track would stop and ask if I was okay. The guy I caught up to must have thought that some paddington demon monster was chasing himalso, if you’re reading this dude, sorry for cutting you off at the start of the rounded section, but also like, you made the classic move of speeding up as I started to pass you, even when I was a step and a half ahead, so maybe just be happy to be surrounded by other fast runners instead of “come-on man”ing me as I jumped back to lane 1?. And by 3ks I barely felt like I could continue.
Check out that heart-rate graph! Damn! I could power a toaster with that little blood-pumping machine! The heart-rate drift never stopped and by the time I was completely pooped around 3.5km it was sitting up at 197bpm. I haven’t gotten it that high in a while, and although I know I have a relatively fast-beating heart, holding a 190+ rate for 15 minutes is hard AFFFFFF.
So I slowed down a bit, and then slowed down some more, and after about 10 disastrous seconds I was bent over with my hands on my knees, realizing that I’d just DNF’d the time trial and would have to wait for another day to break that 18 minute barrier.
Reflecting on my DNF
I was really sad afterwards. I still am about 5 hours later. It sucks to fail at a goal that I worked so hard towards. And it sucks even more to completely DNF, instead of just running slower than expected. I mean - if I had paced it a bit slower I probably still could have set a 10ish second PB, but trying to go >22 seconds faster than I ever have was just too much for today.
I’ve already laid out what I think went wrong from a circumstantial standpoint (see above). Dealing with the stress of work, a crazy-house search, and the knowledge that you’re leaving the country for 6 weeks is not idealbut also gives me so much more respect for professional runners and cyclists that deal with so much more stress than I can imagine. But there’s a few more things that didn’t go right.
First, in terms of my running physiology, I’m still right on the edge of an 18 minute 5k being possible. Doing 5x1k repeats just faster than my target pace might not be enough, maybe I should shoot for 8 repeats, or 5 but a little bit more faster than target pace. My top-end speed has dropped off a bit the last few years, and that could definitely be improved.
But second, and I think this is even more important, is that my mind-space before the event was nowhere close to focused enough for digging and running as fast as I can possibly run for 18 minutes. Running a race like this is almost religious (trust me, it makes sense). It requires devotion and sacrifice, it demands a fully resolute mind that isn’t distractedby other things like sitting down and eating a nice bowl of carbonara, and is totally crazy to pretty much everyone else except for those who get it.
When I started the time trial, I was focused, but only to the extent that I usually am for a workout. It didn’t feel special, and that’s a problem. I wanted to put myself out there and dig in through pain and suffering for 18 minutes. But I was acting as if I was going for a standard workout. I really don’t know how much faster I could have run today if I got myself to the right mindspace before running. Maybe I only would’ve made it half a kilometer further then still bonked out. But I know it would have helped. And that is definitely a lesson to take going forward: pushing yourself beyond what you’ve ever known to be possible requires total focus and determination.
Moving on…
There is absolutely no way I’m giving up. In fact, even in writing this, I forsee the possibility of shooting for a 17 minute 5k in a year or two more of training. That’s how much I believe in the process. I feel like all my workouts and long-runs are going better and better, and I’m just scratching the surface of my genetic potential at this sport.
But for now, I don’t have much to do except be proud of myself for the training I’ve done and the progress I’ve made. That’s real, even if it didn’t manifest itself in a new 5k PB. I have fun plans for the weekend, a lot of training to do before my 50 mile ultramarathon in September, and who knows, maybe at some point in my training I’ll be feeling good and just go for it in lieu of a standard workout.