Tuesday: 60 min elliptical
Wednesday: 60 min elliptical + 4 (including D5K)
Thursday: 60 min elliptical
Saturday: 60 min elliptical + 10
Sunday: 60 min elliptical + 4
I had a breakthrough on the D5, running a 22:54 and taking more than a minute off my recent times. In fact, looking back through my results, it's the fastest D5K I've run in several years. Admittedly the course - which was never quite 5k - is even a bit shorter since the "hangout place" was moved from Osborne Tavern to Panini Pizza early this year. Now the course is just short of 3 miles. Nevertheless a 22:54 is right around the time I was running the D5K while training for the Wineglass Marathon in 2017, when I was running my fastest and before the arthritis problems kicked in. It feels good to know I can still run as fast as I ever did, given that at times during the last two years I doubted whether I'd be able to continue running at all.
I attribute the progress to the elliptical training. I've never dogged it on the elliptical, but the last few weeks I've changed my approach. My workout plan is the "hill program", where the elliptical simulates going up a hill for 5 minutes then down for 5 minutes. So that is six up/down hills in an hour. My old approach was to work harder on the uphills then take it easy on the downhills. I'm still doing that but now in the 2 minutes at the top of the hill I go all out for maximum intensity, leaning into the machine, getting on my toes, and working both my arms and legs as hard as I can. That's the only difference, but it apparently has made a huge difference in my running speed.
Typically I might be able to get one of the D5K miles under 8 minutes, but last week I did all 3 under 8 minutes and put in a 7:24 last mile, by far the fastest mile I've run in a long time.
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