Ben Moreau – Track Time

Well now that  the Zatopek 10,000m is behind me I’m trying to place what my next real focus is. With no marathons planned until the 2nd half of next year, I am shifting my focus to some faster work and giving the track a bit of a bash. I like to always have a goal in mind, even if it’s not my primary focus overall. When you’re digging deep in sessions you need to think of a reason why you’re doing it and if you have no goal, it’s easy to give yourself a way out and ease back.

I think my speed suffered from focussing solely on marathons over the past 12-18 months and I believe my marathon performances will be better for some faster track work for a period. I also have a real ambition to run sub 14.00 for 5,000m and so with 2-3 bites at the cherry over the next few months, I hope I can do it. Compared to my other PBs, my 5,000m is bit soft at 14.09, and I’ve actually run a 4.8km quarters training session that would have been about 14.02 had I run the extra 200m. There are a few PBs in our group around the 13.55-13.58 mark that would be good to take down just to give a few of the guys some abuse as revenge for the past 2.5 years I have received!

I’ll need to move up another notch but if I can get some good weeks in now I believe I can do it. So that’s my focus for the next 6-12 weeks.

The training itself will remain reasonably similar to my normal work, but just biased towards faster track sessions instead of long intervals. I’ll keep my long runs at 2hours 15 as these are vital for my long term marathon progression, and my mileage will still be around the 160km a week mark. I’ve found in the past that I need a phase of several weeks of shorter faster sessions and hill sessions to convert into good track form and at 33 years of age I probably need a few more weeks to bring back the speedy legs! I’m extremely fortunate to be part of the Sydney Running Academy and have such gifted guys to train with – James Nipperess is in incredible form and the 1500 boys such as Jeremy Roff, Jack Stapleton & Josh Wright are all tough to contend with once they step on the track so I’ll hang onto them and remind my legs what lactic acid feels like!