Good work!
For getting faster I'd recommend one session of intervals a week (to replace one of your normal runs).
I picked a relatively flat loop near me (1km away so I could jog there/back as warm up and cool down). The loop itself was about 1km long and didn't involve crossing roads so I never had to stop/wait. And I used my Garmin (Forerunner 920xt) to tell me what to do since I can program it with exact workouts (e.g. warm up until lap button pressed, then do 1km at 5:45/km, 90s recovery, repeat last two steps 8 times, cool down until lap button pressed) - once I press the lap button to finish the warm up it shouts at me what to do and tells me if my pace is too slow/fast, no more button presses are required until I finish the cool down by arriving back home.
Here's an example:
https://www.strava.com/activities/505300803[EDIT] Slightly better on Garmin Connect:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1068148304I used 3 different interval lengths, just rotate through them and increase the number of intervals by one each time (see order below):-
800m: 6 x 800m building up to 10 x 800m. 90s recovery (walk) in between each. Pace is current 5k pace (which I got from doing Parkrun).
1000m: 5 x 1km building up to 8 x 1km. 100s recovery (walk) in between each. Pace is 10k pace or slightly quicker than threshold (*).
1600m: 4 x mile building up to 6 x mile. 120s recovery (walk) in between each. Pace is 10k pace or slightly quicker than threshold (*).
* I used the McMillan pace calculator (
https://www.mcmillanrunning.com/) to get the exact paces based on my 5k times. With a 26:16 parkrun I was using 5:15/km for the 800m intervals and 5:34/km for the 1km/1mile intervals. When my 5k went down to 24:16 these intervals really started to hurt!
As your speed improves you need to adjust these paces appropriately. Either do a regular timed run (e.g. parkrun) or keep an eye on the HR during the intervals, if your HRmax for a certain set of intervals begins to drop then it may be time to up the pace. (e.g. Greg LeMond's "It doesn't get any easier, you just get faster.")
The distances start off lowish (~5km, plus some walking, plus 1km of jogging at each of the start/end) but soon build up to each being 10-11km. The rough order I built up over the 12 weeks was:-
6 x 800m = 4.8km
5 x 1km = 5km
7 x 800m = 5.6km
6 x 1km = 6km
8 x 800m = 6.4km
4 x 1600m = 6.4km
7 x 1km = 7km
9 x 800m = 7.2km
8 x 1km = 8km
5 x 1600m = 8km
10 x 800m = 8km
6 x 1600m = 9.6km
As with intervals on the bike, the first few may seem easy, but by the last one you'll be in a world of fun. I kind of enjoyed the 10x800m but 6x1600m was not fun. No need to thank me!
I need to get back into them, although it's only ~5 weeks until the marathon so they're not really going to do much. Oops.