With a growing obsession with over distance races, and a focus on completion rather than competition, 5ks have somehow lost their way. The prevailing mentality is to go longer and longer and longer, until one day you find yourself down six toenails, dressed head to toe in compression gear, contemplating your first 50-mile ultra!
To me the 5k is still awesome. It encourages you to develop a combination of endurance, speed, and strength. You can train for it and still have a life. You can race one every weekend and still be able to walk normally. I love how tactics come into play more often in a 5k. So what are you waiting for, sign up for a 5k today or heck out your local free Parkrun to rekindle the love for a 5k race!
Check out my top reasons for running a 5k below
Fitness Boost
To run a fast 5k you need a combination of strength, speed, power and endurance. Running intervals and racing over the 5k distance is a great fitness boost, which will in turn help you run a better marathon in the long run in theory making that marathon pace feel a lot easier…. I always like to run a 5k race to help ‘blow the cob webs away’.
More Free Time
Running a 5k takes up a lot less of your time giving you more time to focus on other things in life. Naturally when training for a 5k you don’t need to run as many miles throughout the week and it’s amazing how much more time you have on a Sunday when you’re not out running for 3-hours in the morning!
Reduced Injury Risk
Of course you can get injured doing 5k’s but overuse injuries go hand in hand with marathon training. With less overall mileage and sessions that involve a greater variety of paces, you’ll be more likely to stay healthy.
Race More Often
Everyone loves racing right? Well with the 5k you have the prefect excuse to race more frequently without the need of lots of post race recovery. If you mess up the 5k or you have bad weather, you can just get in your car and try again next week. Lets face it, we all have bad days from time to time!
Travel
With 5k’s taking place in most parks throughout the UK on a Saturday morning and plenty of other 5k events around you don’t have to spend vast amounts of money traveling to and from races, giving you more money to spend on new running trainers…. (5k’s are also generally much cheaper to enter too)
Hitting the Wall
It does happen in the 5k, but despite the pain its over much, much quicker!
Style
No bum bags. No water bottles. No gels or blocks or powders or bars. No shorts with 30 pockets. No Vaseline stains. You can run a 5k in respectable running attire!
