How I Broke 15 Minutes in the 5K l Insights on Workouts, Long Runs and Mileage

Senior Editor Alex Cyr travels to a fast and flat 5k road race in Stratford, Ontario, where he attempts to take home gold and run it faster than fifteen minutes. Fourteen weeks into a half-marathon build, he tests his foot speed by opening in a breakneck first-kilometre in classic Fade From The Front fashion -- and tries to hold on for the win.

After the race, Alex discusses what he thinks helped him build the fitness and speed required for a fast 5k race. Here, he shares which type of workouts have helped him, what part of classic 5k training is overrated, and how he manages to develop speed and strength without running high mileage.

Special thanks to the Stratford 5k for helping us capture content!

0:00 - 1:04 - Intro
1:05 - 1:25 - Race Footage
1:26 - 2:56 - Post-race analysis
2:57 - 3:50 - Current training
3:51 - 5:24 - Threshold training
5:25 - 6:19 - Speed Work
6:20 - 7:20 - Workouts per week
7:21 - 8:05 - Weekly Mileage
8:06 - 10:08 - In-season racing
10:09 - 10:24 - Outro

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Runner: Alex Cyr

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[johnlofranco]

Hey! Alex's coach here. First of all, I want to say, my voice is not that deep. Second, wanted to share my thoughts on why Alex is able to run this fast. As he noted, spending a lot of time at threshold is key. On the point of mileage, people get hung up on the number. I do think that running more is an important element to improving in running. In Alex's case, since he has had injury problems in the past, we definitely wanted to limit the overall load, but make sure we were doing enough threshold, so that's why he is running as much as he is running. But when I plan the week i DON'T say "ok we need 85k this week." What I do is I put in the important workouts (thresholds, long run) and then fill the other days with easy running that is slightly more than the previous week (or less or the same depending on if we are taking a recovery week). It's also interesting to note that Alex ran 14:26 about a month ago in Toronto. Likely no video was made of that because the lead up was kind of abnormal. He did a video on running in the French alps which you can find here somewhere. That week he had a bit of an niggle so was only running 30min/day and no workouts. Despite that and the travel, he still ran a massive PB. So I think props go to Alex for being flexible in his training, willing to listen and adjust, and to race like a dawg. That's kind of an important part. And what threshold training is missing is that big hurt feeling that you get when you do hard workouts (and when you race 5k). It's going to happen in the race, and Alex has been prepared to handle that each time. That may be due to two things. One is that he has a long history in the sport, going back to high school, so he has done hard intervals before. This experience doesn't go away. Second is that, by focusing on threshold training, he's actually saving up the creative and emotional energy needed to go deep in the race. He hasn't left his dawg at the track, if you will. So really, big credit to Alex for doing the work and being hard. Also, his goal race is a half-marathon so all of a sudden that non-specific threshold training has become very specific. Looking forward to seeing how it goes!

[javierpenafieldurruty]

Thanks for the video! My goal is run a under 19 minutes 5k in 3 weeks (I just run a 1:34 half)

[Frank-wqpz]

Great video Alex, I'm currently traying to archive sub 18min 5k 😊
Last weekend ran a 10k race with a new PB 37:48 😁

[zsoltvidor]

I'm trying to break 17 min in 5K and 35 min in 10K, according to my watch my pb is exactly 17 min in 5K and 35:14 in 10K so I hope it is going to happen in this year soon.Unfortunately I can't afford to hire a coach, I wish I could.

[UmbrellasJM]

Are long runs considered 1 of your 3 workout runs?

[MitchellWongHo]

Is this the Drake segments all over again? 😆