Goals as achievable targets

5000m PB : 16:29.9

5k SB (post-Sept 2011) : 18:30 (training split)

Just under 6 months to go until BUCS 5000m.  Plenty of time?  Seeing me sit here in my birthday Onesie you might be forgiven for thinking so.  In all my time as a pseudo-athlete you’d think I’d have learnt to manage my expectations.  Goals are just numbers, but it’s too easy to pick one and think it so many times it no longer sounds good.  You then keep increasing the goal, and then end up with disappointment.  All of a sudden a 28 minute 10k doesn’t seem fast enough, and your latest 34 minute effort just makes you miserable enough to eat a whole pack of hob nobs.  Now you’re not race weight, and the cycle of doom continues.  So how do I pick what I want to achieve?

In 6 months time, I can announce, my target is to be in a position to run 15:50 for 5000m.  It might not happen on the day for a dozen different reasons, but I want to be in a position to achieve it.  3:10 a km, 76 second a lap, for 12 and a half gruelling laps.  Hell I’ve even run 3 of those back to back.  3 kilometres that is.  So surely this is achievable?  Picking a goal so slow that if achieved will still be 3 minutes slower than the world record, so slow in fact that Keninisa Bekele would have lapped me 3 times (I think) might sound unambitious.  But for me this would represent a 40 second, or 4.5% improvement over my current best time.  But as proved by others, namely Steven Bayton (2010), magical things can happen that cause targets to be re-evaluated, or illness, injury, demotivation, or just plain bad luck can de rail even the prettiest and most efficient excel spreadsheet.

So where am I at the moment?  And how do I get to where I want to be?  Having just recovered from a summer out with injury, leaving me with the ability to only run for 10 lung-wrenching minutes, I’ve now completed 8 weeks of transitionary training.  This is my honest assessment of where I am now, compared to where I need to be:

VO2 max :                   worse than a sedentary horse.

Endurance :                 modest.

Lactate threshold :      physically to shy to try.

Muscular strength :    laughable.

Technique :                 lets just say there lots of room for improvement.

Weight :                      not race weight.

Potential :                    … meh.

Cold winter mornings, long dark runs, grass hill after grass hill, hour after hour thinking about technique, weights, cross country races that hopefully don’t involve me falling on my face in the mud (again), continuous hunger, mind numbing drills to improve my form, ice baths, and Ally constantly ordering to improve my posture at the dinner table.  Those who know me know that I must have a constantly evolving yet structured training programme, planned out for month after month.  Am I going to make it?  Watch this space…