Time to work out a training schedule. The triathlon is now 8 weeks away. That's more than enough time to give me a fighting chance of running a sub 20-minute 5K. I'm booked into the Standard Chartered Great City Race, which takes place 4 weeks

minutes off my target time of 20 minutes. I actually came in at 22:05 and had even managed a sprint finish. Admittedly, there were a number of reasons why I did so badly. Firstly, I hadn't taken on nearly enough water and after 5 minutes of running my

this into this fartlek session this week:(2 mins easy, 30 secs hard, 1 min 30 secs easy,  30 sec hard) x 10. Cool down (10 mins)…where the 'hard' is 6:26 min-mile pace. The second area is my posture. I'm an incredibly inefficient runner, which I think is largely down

very high in the Barnard camp. Speed session this week (post illness): 3x200m with 30sec rest – 3 minute break (repeat 3 times)

(over the course of about 6 months) to knock my 5K PB time down from around 24 minutes to 19:56!Admittedly, this time is not official. It was measured during one particular Thursday in April, at a 5K handicap race against the people at the Virgin London

exposed arse cheeks. Even the race numbers are hard to work out (the numbers are attached using pieces of elastic and a clip to a stretchy belt that goes around your waist, which I broke).So if I wasn’t nervous enough already about breaking a 20-minute 5K

. It's at this point that you start to become less efficient with your exercise. After about 15 mins or so of running the results were in. In a nutshell I've got a massive lung capacity but a relatively low FEV1, which is the force of air exhaled

James Barnard is Multimedia Designer at Runner's World, and blogs about running as Sir Jogalot (www.sirjogalot.com). He paced the 11-minute mile group at this year's Virgin London Marathon - the following is an excerpt from his blog.Two words sum up