 This week in Paris Marathon Training I do my penultimate treadmill interval session on Zwift. I run my final 20 mile long run and I smash out one of the fastest 5ks I have ever done. Welcome to week 11 of the Paris Marathon Training Series. We are not going to go over week 11 of the Paris Marathon Training Block in any great detail because if you've been following the series so far you'll know what we do for most of the week but the series is linked up there if you want to go and check it out. Suffice to say week 11 has followed the same pattern as all the other weeks of the training block with one significant omission. This week I didn't go to the track at all. Having done the half marathon on Sunday I couldn't do a track session and I decided to just do an easy run on Monday. No change to our usual easy sessions on the treadmill on Tuesday and another hard session on the treadmill on Wednesday. So the interval session this week consisted of eight times 90 seconds with a one minute recovery over two blocks. So we did four sets of 90 seconds increasing in speed and then we had a recovery section and then we did another four sets of 90 seconds. As hard as we could go speeding up every rep and I think the heart rate reflects that some really good high zone four running on Wednesday. As always in these sessions the aim is to get the heart rate well into zone four and zone five really building up that VO2 max trying to increase the amount of oxygen that we have available to go to our muscles to make us run faster on marathon day and you'll notice throughout this training block I've been doing at least two of those sessions a week one on the track and one on the treadmill. It's important not to do too many interval sessions a week you don't want to increase your risk of injury or tie yourself out too much so you can't run the next day but then you also need to balance that and do at least one or two maximum of three of those sessions a week to get your heart rate pumping really hard get used to fast running and increase the oxygen that is going to your muscles. Nothing overly exciting to report from my double run days on Thursday and Friday. Although having said that just because they're not exciting doesn't mean they're not important double run days are always important we're still building that endurance and cementing that aerobic base that we built up over the last 12 weeks of this training series and we're maintaining and improving calf muscle strength quadricep strength by doing those climbing sessions in the morning. But now we come to the weekend and what a fabulous weekend it was absolutely loved this weekend of running and I started on Saturday going out to park run and running right here on this seafront doing the worthy park run. Remember last week I had a long chat with Stuart Mills and Stuart suggested to me that this week I smash out park run as hard as I could but not forgetting to warm up now I very rarely do much of a long warm up for park run on a Saturday morning and usually it's about one kilometer this week I made sure I got out early and I did a good four kilometers of warm up and then some strides and some drills to make sure I was completely ready for what I was about to do now bear in mind that wording park run is one of the fastest park runs in the country I don't know off the top of my head which it is but I'll link it up there and so I lined up on the start line right at the front of the pack maybe second row and set off following Stuart's advice of not looking at my watch and contrary to the advice I often give people Stuart said my last kilometer should not be my fastest go out hard and then just enjoy the feeling of running fast forget about your time forget about your splits just keep going run fast and sure enough my first kilometer was my absolute fastest kilometer and by the end I was struggling you can see the fourth kilometer is my slowest when I often have a little mental block I'm still a long way from the home I'm really tired I want to stop and you just slow down just that little bit but I did manage to get it together a bit for the final kilometer and if you look at it actually for not looking at my watch those five kilometers are really not very far apart at all and I crossed the line in 18 minutes 23 seconds blowing my park run PB out of the water completely by about 30 seconds or so it comes out as my second fastest ever 5k and if we look at it in terms of age grading on the power of 10 website well it's right at the top to cap off this week's 125 kilometers of running we did a solid 20 mile run on Sunday at a pace just about a minute below my projected marathon pace 13 of the 125 kilometers this week was hard effort that's about 10% of my running this week in terms of distance was a hard effort outside we did 74 kilometers indoors on the treadmill on Zwift 51 kilometers in terms of time spent in zones 4 and 5 it's about 4% so we did 12 hours of running half an hour of that was in zones 4 and 5 so not quite as much as in previous weeks but we are winding down two hard efforts out of 12 so that's what 16% in terms of the number of activities 16% of my running activities were hard efforts if you'd like to watch the video I made of my story half marathon and how I felt about it then click that link right there otherwise we'll see you on the start line for the next episode of the Paris marathon training series next time take care everyone bye bye