Johnny Hall's Travels and Travails

I'm going along to the track tomorrow for the start of my interval training, in prep for Lochaber. I didn't run intervals much during last summer (just a bit of fartlek and some unstructured hill work), so I'm hoping that they'll provide me a nice speed boost.

I'm definitely getting faster without doing them (I ran 11 miles yesterday at about 7:50 min/miles on rolling ground, whilst last year I was probably anything up to a minute slower) but I'm anything but speedy.

I'm interested to see how it goes. I'm only running 3 times a week at the moment, but my runs are going to be strictly pace controlled - one track interval session, one tempo run up to 10 miles and one long run up to 20 miles (3 hours). My aim is a sub 3:30 marathon but looking at the figures, there's a distinct possibility to go faster than that. I won't count my chickens though.

I'm only running 3 times a week (4 really, since I run off the bike once a week but only for about 30 minutes easy) because I have to fit in riding 3 times a week, swimming 4 times a week and lifting twice. The (marathon) training plan I'm following is specifically designed to help you run a faster marathon on 3 times a week running, though. I toyed with it last year but couldn't get to a track so I built my own programme. It seemed to work but this time, I'm ramping it up.

I'd like to get a more respectable 10K time too - somewhere in the low 40s but I'm not going to concentrate on that - it'll just have to be a bonus side effect.