Pop Quiz Hot Shot!

You are looking to do a 5k race on Feb 27, 2005 just for shits and giggles.

You are about 180lbs with 8% body fat give or take, you want to maintain your hard earned muscles and maintain your strength.

You want to train for this coming race just so you can do somewhat well (you ran XC in high school and is fairly good shape overall).

What do you do? How do you train?

Here’s my proposal:
M: Upperbody lift
Tu: Medium run (30 min?)
W: Lowerbody lift
Th: Long run (45 min?)
F: Upperbody lift in the morning, Thai Boxing sparring at night
Sa: Thai Boxing in the morning and/or light run
Su: Sprint workouts (intervals: something like 10x100s, or 4x400s, 3x1 mi, mixture)

Thoughts comments?

I have 5 weeks. I will taper the week of the race of course. Then after the race I go back to 4 times lifting and focus on that again.

Thanks.

That looks good. Another option could be this:

Monday- off
Tuesday-5k run, go for a best time.
Wednesday-Total Body workout
Thursday-30 min run
Friday-Muay Thai
Saturday- Muay Thai, Sprint Session, or both, if both do sprints before Muay Thai
Sunday-Total Body workout

This variation gives you a complete day off, which may help with your recovery. Since there’s only two days of lifting though, you may have a harder time preserving mass compared to your routine. Which routine you do is your choice, they have advantages over each other. for the 30 min run, i recommend interval running. See Christian Thibadeau’s running man article for details. Good luck with it man and let us know how it goes.

I ran a 5K last summer with about 2 weeks training and managed to get 1st place in my age bracket 20-29. I ran 3-4 days a week at 7min/miles for as long as I could manage. Come race day you are pumped enough to run faster than that especially when you can see the end! I sprinted all out the last 200 yards so I could finish just behind my wife, and to beat some punk kid that passed me early on. I find if I target someone to beat that is just slightly ahead of me I do much better than just running against a clock.

You could try CT’s Part Time Beast workout, which means you only have to lift weights 2x week. I am about to finish it and haven’t lost any size over the 5 weeks I have been doing so far (1 week to go). The reason I chose to do this was so that I could increase the frequency of doing cardio stuff so I could do some triathalons in the next month or so, so I think that you could use a similar strategy. Just don’t be like me and forget to do the cardio in the extra time you have just freed up! (I became very lazy during my summer holidays and despite having three weeks off work and heaps of spare time I only ended up doing about 2 cardio sessions per week on top of the weights, not sure if I’m fit enough to do the triathlons now, lol!)

If you used this strategy I would probably run 3x per week. Try this program:

M: 5K run with intervals e.g. jog past 4 telegraph poles/street light poles then sprint to the next pole.
Tu: Part Time Workout 1
W: Long run at EASY pace (45-60min), preferably in afternoon = max recovery time from weights
Th: 5K run at medium pace (30 min?)
F: Part Time Workout 2 in the morning, Thai Boxing sparring at night
Sa: Long sprints e.g 5x400m, 3x800m, 2x1500m. Try a different one each week
Su: Off (Very important!)

Hope this helps,

Ben