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Speed Training

My race times are quite slow and I would like to be able to run faster. Reading articles on the Internet on how to improve speed, points me to two things - lose weight and speed training. I'm already trying to lose weight by running, so I looked deeper into speed training and came across a few - hills, striders, fartlek, tempo and intervals.

I tried striders (alternating almost sprinting for just a few meters then resting; doing 8-12 sets of these) which seemed to be the easiest next to doing hills. My knees really hurt afterwards and I was afraid it will just give me injuries. So except for doing hills, I decided to just wait till I'm a lot lighter before doing speed training.

But recently, I came across an article in Runner's World by my favorite Jeff Galloway on how to get started on speed training. I studied it, and it looked doable without risking injury - just like any other advise from Jeff Galloway. So, I programmed it in my Run-Mate iPod Touch application and tried the first workout. No pains but it gave me a good workout. I now incorporated the workouts in my weekday runs - 1 speed workout per week. I hope this improves my speed safely.

If after doing these and my speed still has not improved, my next plan is to do the Couch-to-5K training plan all over again, but this time, I'll run the run portions a bit faster than how I normally run.

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