Agreed BB, if you've just done a PB at Wycombe then head to Wokingham in Feb and knock another two minutes of your PB time. That's a great way to knock 5 minutes from your PB every year, which is a reasonable target for any runner, even someone with a 1:15 PB.
McBood, an aspiring local runner can improve by doing the following:
1) Avoiding "race culture". A race has an extremely destructive impact on the body if ran all-out. An all-out marathon (and to lesser extent) half marathon can actually put a training regime back several months as well as doing irreperable damage to your cardio and aerobic/anaeorobic systems. Ideally, only do one race a year, not a marathon (any running session over two plus hours does long term damage to your musculo-skeletal system).
2)Set your goals and make them happen. Good example is Chiltern Eddie. Read the report on the Bucks Free Press website ; the man wanted to win, but to win he really hurt himself in the last five miles bringing it home, and to be frank, according to reports, was almost going backwards when he made the line (by comparison, Sarah Gee accelerated into a stunning sprint finish) . Now Eddie may never go sub 1:10 in the HM, and his extreme effort on Sunday will have put that cause back some way, but he is well capable of coming back next year and winning in a similar time and it sounds like that is exactly what he wants to do!
3) Training. Excepting the weekly interval session if your running session is not 1-2 hours long then your daft. It's all about time on feet: spending the right amount of time on your feet every day, not too little and not too much. Days off don 't help. You decide the pace, but for most of them keep the heart rate at 120-130 bpm. Definitely always keep the heart rate under 140 bpm on all your runs. Save all the pace bravado and heroics for the interval session, you want to hurt yourself, hurt yourself as bad as you like in THAT session, that'll humble you.
4)Know your body. We're adapting all the time as runners. I have never been injured, but have adaption pains all the time. At the moment for example, I have a pain in the bridge of the right foot. It is happening because I recently upped session pace (as my HR was getting too low) and as a result of that increase in pace the toes of my right foot are striking the ground a little diiferently. The increase in pace also gave me some adaptation pain for two days in the flexors of my left hip, but that went quickly. Isn't the human body great, it automatically widens your stride as you make cardio improvements!
5) Give it ten years, that's how long it takes to become a top class runner with steady, progressive daily training.
6) Get yourself motivated, when your daily run gets a little hard after 1hr 45 minutes get a nice hammer beat going in your head:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXh1tW16V-8
That help McBood?
