Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

i want to break 16 minutes for the 5k by the end of the year. in our part of the world we are in the middle of the cross country season, and i did a 4.4km cross race yesterday. muddy as hell, cold and windy, with steeplechase hurdles and water jumps to contend with. Managed to get 5th, relatively happy with that. Today the coach is having me do 8-10 x 200m @ 26-27 seconds each, with a 200m walk/jog recovery, after a long warm up with lots of drills. i found this session really hard last week, due to the race the day before, which i won. i will also do a 30 min easy-moderate jog later on in the day to get the lactate out of the legs for tomorrow. if anyone wants to jump in at any stage and tell me what i should or should not be doing that would be much appreciated. thank you.

coach had us do an easy hour run at about 4 min 30 per km instead as we all felt a bit dead.

yesterday it was freezing so i did this workout twice, once in the morning and once at night on a treadmill. 5km tempo run, first 3.4km @ 3 min 40 per km, then the next 1.3km @ 3 min 15 per km, then the last 300m @ 3 min per km.

yesterday i did 4 x 2km @ 5k race pace, going through each km in 3 min 24 with 3 min walk recovery. then day before that I did a 5km tempo run in 17:04, found it fairly straightforward.