Atlantic Athletic Club

Wednesday Time Trial:

Our time trial starts and finishes outside Newport Deli/Wakame in Beach Road and takes runners on a fast, flat route along the Sea Point Promenade.

We offer two options for Time Trial:

A morning group that meets at the Sea Point swimming pool to start at 6am. They jog to the start of the Time Trial to warm up and then they run the 5km route.

An evening group that meets outside New Port Deli to start running the Time Trial at 6pm.

We plan to introduce a lucky draw to reward regular Time Trial participation. Details to follow once finalised.

Here’s some tips on how TT can work for you.

TIME TRIALS by Mike Russell

The time trial in itself is not a race.  It’s a way of assessing how comfortably you can run over a fixed distance and a strategy to improve your actual race times.  It is based on the idea of relative comfort – once you can run comfortably over the chosen distance, then the next step is to up your pace and run at that pace until the same level of comfort is achieved.  To quantify comfort, let’s assume that it represents a time trial pace where your heart rate returns to its resting level within 5 minutes of recovery after you finish your time trial.

For example, say you run 5km in 25 minutes, comfortably and your heart rate recovers within 5 minutes.  When you run your next time trial, aim for something quicker than 25 minutes, say 23:45.  Keep running your time trials at this pace until you reach a point when your heart rate recovers within 5 minutes.  Once this is achieved then it is time to up the pace once more.  And so continue until you have reached a level where you simply cannot run any faster without feeling comfortable within a reasonable time afterwards.  Your aim is to achieve your maximum level of effort with the objective of training for longer races.

Take a 21km for example; break the race into 3 x 5km sections and 1 x 6km section.  If your level of effort for a 5km time trail is comfortable at 4:30mins/km (or 22mins30secs).

Run the 1st 5km at 5:00min/km = 25mins

Run the 2nd 5km at 4:45min/km = 23mins 45secs

Run the 3rd 5km at 4:30min/km = 22min 30secs

Run the last 6km at 4:30min/km or better = 27min

Total time for 21km = 1hr 38min 15secs

The same approach can be used for a marathon with a breakdown of 4 x 8km sections and the last section being 10km.  The 8km time trial can be used for this training.

Anybody can use this method no matter what your pace.  I promise you it works!  It worked for me and many other good runners.  Of course it all depends on your level of fitness, discipline and most importantly, a will to improve your race times.