I'm struggling to break the 18 minute - 5km barrier. The weekly Tuesday race I enter finishes in a few weeks for the season, and I really want to crack it this season.
My training runs are all conventional runs of between 5 and 15km. I do no Interval training. Effort in training runs ranges from 4:10/km up to around 5:00/km on longer runs. In the actual weekly race, I'm hitting just under 3:50/km
I record most of my training runs & races with runkeeper, which may be of use in spotting what I'm doing wrong. In Runkeeper you can drill in to each activity to see pace, elevation of each run.
My weekly official times have been: 18.48, 18.21, 18.15,missed,18.09,18.08
Can anyone offer tips; should I be running longer and slower? More hills? Shorter, faster training runs?
I've tried laying off alcohol completely for a week leading up the the race, and eating more sensibly, because it started to feel like a barrier that more training wasn't going to get me past - but no luck, I plateaued last week at around 18:10.
I have the Garmin heart rate attachment, which I stopped using, but should I bring this back into my training, should I be looking to run for longer at higher heart rate?
I'm out of ideas, but time is running out and ideas greatly appreciated!
Updated with answers to Christopher's questions. And Hi! Very positive about the site so far, big fan of the computer nerd versions of it, seems the fitness one is similarly helpful!