Way to go for all of you who finished out Week 7 of the running training program. By now you should be getting better at gauging your paces for the workouts and noticing that you are feeling more fluid and faster. Soon you'll be burning up the track and roads, right?! From last week you should be focusing on one aspect of your form that needs improvement. We are going to continue doing that this week, except now you will be extra diligent the last ten minutes of each run.

The goal of this week is to continue to improve your running form and efficiency and develop your aerobic capacity with a tempo run. This will be a continuous, sustained effort that is just below that which you would be running in a race. You want to keep your heart rate around 80% of your maximum and you should feel like you are going hard but still able to maintain your form. It is not all out, but getting near that point. The most successful tempo runs will work on a negative split idea in that you will gradually be getting faster as you go along so that by the end you are at your fastest pace instead of fading from going out too fast. This is hard to do, even pros make the mistake of getting overly zealous at the start and dying by the end.

Monday: Weight routine with a five minute cardio warm-up
Tuesday: Short interval workout for a total of 35-50 minutes (within your run do 8 hard sprints for 30 seconds each; make sure you get at least 2 minutes recovery jog between sprints)
Wednesday: Easy run or cross train for 40-55 minutes
Thursday: Weight routine with a five minute cardio warm-up
Friday: Tempo run workout for total of 35-50 minutes (with a warm-up and cool-down you should do a 'comfortably hard' effort for 20 minutes)
Saturday: Easy run for 40-55 minutes
Sunday: Long run 40-70 minutes easy

Keep notes on how you feel during and after your runs in your training log and be sure to refuel and rehydrate within 30 minutes of completing each workout. This will make sure you recover properly, build muscle, and come back stronger next time!

Week 9