My goal is to run 10KM in around 49 minutes. I’ve been doing the Jeff Galloway 10KM training plan & I think its broken. I talked via chat with a Garmin advisor online recently & he assured me that it is correct, but I have to disagree having seen further evidence in Jeff's videos more recently.
I would expect to run further than 10km in a plan; Jeff's "How to run faster" video states that "if half marathon runners take their training all the way up to 14 miles, rather than just 10, then they will tend to experience an average time improvement of 7 minutes". This is fine, it makes sense as you build additional stamina above the target distance.
Given that a half marathon is 13.1 miles & his own words suggest that running 14 miles will give an improvement, it is logical to assume that his plan would follow a similar principal. Except it doesn't, it goes way beyond that, way, way beyond that. In the past two weeks, weeks 9 & 10 of the program I have run 6 times. 2 runs are shorter hill repeats workouts, each 7.32km in around 40 minutes. The other 4 runs were:
- "Long easy run" of 20.92km, total of 23.29km including warm-up and cooldown; 144 minutes of running (95 minutes longer than target time and 13.29km longer than target distance).
- "Speed repeats" of 16x 800m at a challenging pace; which covered 20km in 127 minutes of running (58 minutes above target time, 10km above target distance)
- "Goal pace repeats" including magic mile (hard mile) and 8x goal pace repeats; which covered 14.81km (41 minutes above target time, 4.81km above target distance)
- "Speed repeats" of 18x 800m at a challenging pace; which covered 22.96km in 140 minutes (91 minutes above target time, 12.96km above target distance)
Week 9 totalled 50.61km (310 mins) and 10 totalled 45.09km (271 mins) – 6 runs, nearly 100km! Remember, this is a 10km target.
I was due to run today, but I cannot as my inner right knee is now injured. I am not especially surprised, but today's run was scheduled as 24.14km which with warm-up/down would likely be over 26km - 16km above target distance.
My speed repeats for Saturday are projected at 20x 800m. I needed isotonic gels & water backpack for my last 18x. This is brutal.
In a distance comparison to the training mentioned in Jeff's video of a 13.1 mile half-marathon to train up to 14 miles, this training plan is comparing an increase in distance from 106.8% in the half-marathon training, to 260% in the 10KM training plan. That is an enormous difference - I cannot believe that this is correct.
In a time comparison with speed repeats; I concede there is a walking/recovery element to it, so I will remove that from the equation. 18x800m is 18x3 minute rests, so 54 minutes can be deducted from the final time which was 140 minutes, so we're talking 86 minutes challenging activity here. That's still 175% more time than the target race goal.
So distance & time wise, we are being told to do 260% and 175% more respectively than the target goal in training. It cannot be right.
