congratz!
i would rank it:
General fitness >> Reduced body weight >>>>>>>>> Weather > Shoes
+1 to everything pokerron said. it also depends what you mean with "reduced body weight". the difference between running with 250lbs and 150lbs is obviously HUGE. (i'd guesstimate 5min over a 5k). but it will take a while to get down to this weight (if that's even the goal).
in the end, general fitness will be the biggest factor in your race times.
i think weather is slightly more important than shoes because you are atm still very overweight (especially compared to typical runners). so you are (most probably) hit harder by hot weather (higher mass to surface area - ratio). but it shouldn't play a big role in a 5k, unless we're talking about extreme weather.
intervals etc: i'd suggest to simply exchange one easy run with a harder training effort, and keep the rest the same. so you have 2 hard days (interval/hills/tempo and the weekly long run) and 2 or 3 easy days. you slowly expand the weekly volume (while still having a recovery week every 3-4 weeks) and slowly expand the long run distance.
so, for example:
monday: rest
tuesday: easy day
wednesday: intervals / hills / tempo runs
thursday: rest
friday: easy day
saturday: rest
sunday: long run
just make sure to somewhat seperate the two hard days each week, the rest doesn't matter too much.
possible intervals / hills / tempo runs: as pokerron said, you can handle this very flexible. always warm up properly and cool down afterwards. i'd suggest to do maybe 2-3 miles of "hard effort" atm (and increase this ~linearly with total weekly distance, so this shouldn't be much more than 10% of your weekly volume). use the table from
http://www.runbayou.com/jackd.htm (your vdot is 31 atm) for the pace guidelines when you start out. then of course, do it faster the next week, if it's too easy (or slow down if it's too hard). but those efforts should be hard, but not quite race-intensity hard. possible examples:
- 4x800m intervals (around 4min45 for each 800m) with a 3min break: walk or very slow run in between. you can vary distance (maybe between 200m and 1 mile), # of repeats, pace, break times etc. ; just pick suitable values. the first ones should feel somewhat easy, the last one should be very hard.
- just do a hilly trail run at a high intensity (but just for maybe ~2 miles).
- do a fartlek run: just pick arbitrary "landmarks" that are maybe 50 or 200 meters ahead (like a tree or a stop light or a trash container) that you "sprint" to, and then go back into easy pace. then pick the next landmark etc
- do a normal tempo run: warm up, run 3km at a very fast pace (around 5k pace or slightly slower), cool down.
- do an increasing tempo run. warm up with easy pace and do maybe 3 or 4km with slowly increasing pace. (start out maybe one minute per mile slower than your 5k pace and finish maybe 30seconds faster per mile; increase every 500m or whatever, just do it regularly).
- do hill repeats: pick a "hill" (not too steep or long at first). then run up at a high speed and jog down slowly (or maybe walk down at the beginning), then repeat immediately as soon as you reach the bottom. start out with a pace that you can (hopefully) keep up until the end. those are hard, start out easy. as an example, start out with a hill that takes you 2min to run up (in a pace that you can keep up 5 more times). then run/walk down so that you reach the bottom in 2 minutes, then repeat for a total of 6 times.
shuffle between those and similar workouts somewhat regularly (so don't JUST do hill repeats). but if you're in the mood for hill repeats, sure, do it 3 weeks in a row (but you won't do that, hehe).
to start out, i would structure those workouts clearly, so that you know exactly what you do on the upcoming run. this makes it imho easier to do them properly. the workouts are hard and it's easier to do the last repeats if you go into the workout with the clear plan to do x repeats. over time, you will (probably) automatically start to do things more by feel.
Last edited by trontron; 09-27-2015 at 05:00 PM.