, sodium, calcium and magnesium in your diet. You can also incorporate plyometric exercises (ie bounding and hopping) into your sessions, to improve the strength and endurance of your leg muscles. An ideal time to incorporate plyometrics is before a speed

fortnight with your normal faster-than-mile-pace sessions. Try 8-12 x 1 minute up a hill that is relatively tough without being hands-on-knees steep.Downhill stridesQuickening your stride rate will increase your speed, though you need to do it safely. Run

. These schedules contains a mixture of repetition running, hill sessions and pace runs, for improving running speed, plus long runs for endurance. For advanced runners, the highest weekly mileage reaches a plateau of 55-60 miles a week, but there’s no reason why

will develop a much better base than if you train like an animal one weekend out of three. Mix a lot of long, medium-intensity bikes and runs with some very structured sessions. The structured sessions act as a sharpener just to get your speed up." - Alex Lewis

. Write down the usual statistics, such as drills performed, distance swum, your run routes and mileages, time spent cycling, terrain covered and average speed, as well as how you felt during a session. When you notice your statistics or mood dipping, take

between core sessions, then re-evaluate your goal time. It's probably too fast.Sprinkle in supplemental speed By the third week, add some 100m strides at the end of each interval session (except when 100m repetitions are a formal part of the session). Work

markers to judge your pace, but swim pacing is a tricky business. Incorporate these stroke-count and pacing sessions from Dan Bullock, coach and trainer at www.swimfortri.co.uk, into your training and learn how to master your pacing in the open water

, and comes with eight preset programmes. A useful feature was that you could store four different user profiles and track your sessions. Also impressive was the Position Speed Control mode – the speed of the belt changes in relation to where you are, so

and then gradually slowing back down again.I enjoy these sessions: you've got a warm-up, a bit of speed and a cool-down all in one. I treat them as sort of medium-level training. Not as hard as intervals, but harder than short steady race-pace runs.See full thread

endurance, your aerobic fitness and your speed endurance. The former comes from long, slow runs and from the accumulation of weekly mileage; aerobic fitness is being improved by any session in which you are able to get your pulse rate into the training zone