Short Story of the 5000m.
This is a very different story from the 3000m one. Back in 1978 I had raced four marathons, two of them that year wins in Canberra, the last a PB of 2:26.58 in November. After each marathon race was completed, my marathon training continued unabated. Whenever my marathon training was going well, my times for shorter distances as far down as 1500m would improve. Just two months after the PB marathon, in January 1979, I ran in a low key interclub track race over 5000m and "out of the blue" ran a fast time which is still my PB today. Interesting though that I didn't prepare for it; it was a hot and windy January afternoon; the field was small; I trailed the leader for the first four laps then took the lead and was never pressed; and finished "knowing" that I could run a lot faster on a good day with competition. But I never did get back close to that 15:10.5; possibly because I ran another four hard marathons in 1979 which may have been one or two marathons too many, and also because I upped my training distances even more than before, and I had probably reached optimal levels of training in 1978. But how does one know unless one experiments? Anyway, I did have a good sequence of 5000m races for about 15 years, all around the 15:30 to 15:40 mark. But I never did crack the 72 second per lap 15:00 time, or even run close to 15:10 again.
The 5k was my favourite event for many years, until I lost form and it took too long and the 3k became my favourite.
The 10k story will be different again. Which goes to show that, even for the one person, there are many different approaches one may take to training and racing. So take heart, you can fit your training pattern around other things, adapt it to your lifestyle. You don't have to follow one exact training program and fit everything else around it, in order to succeed.
I hope you are still on holidays. I am. My full routine resumes in a couple more days' time.
