North East Running

One of the best running websites is Power of Ten where you can look through all of your races over the years. Looking at my performance card below it shows how my running has developed - from 2015-2017 doing only parkruns and going from just over 20 minutes to just under 19 minutes. Then slowly doing road races from 10k up to marathon.  Power of Ten performance card I thought it might be interesting to put my PB times into the WAVA calculator to assess which distance was my strongest. https://www.fetcheveryone.com/training-calculators-wava.php   " Age grading looks at world beating times set by people of all ages to work out what someone of your age and gender is capable of. World class athletes score close to 100. The rest of us won't be so high, but you can use this tool to see which distances you've excelled at; and which ones need some work ." WAVA calculator Below is a chart of my WAVA scores - this levels things up and shows, relatively, which my strongest dist

Over the last few years I have ran quite a few road races and loads (170+) parkruns - but I have done very few races on the track. I fancied getting a decent 1500m effort on my Power of Ten record so put my name forward for a local club event. This then left me with the questions: What time do I want to aim for? What is the race strategy to get that time?  In terms of a target time, I know that if I run a really good parkrun (5km) I can get 17:30 which is 3:30/km. So a 1500m at 3:30/km should be comfortable - which would equal a 5:15 1500m. I also like round numbers - so going for a sub 5 minute 1500m seemed like the target to go for. This would need an average of 3:20/km pace. A 12x400m interval session is always a good indicator as to what speed you can run at. Two screenshots below show sessions I've done this year (a) with the club on a proper track and (b) on a lunchtime on a bit of flat tarmac. The track efforts where at 3:10-3:15/km pace. The lunchtime efforts where at 3:15-