How to improve my run times?

[Veronica]

Intervals and running with someone who runs faster than me (Thom) has helped me get faster.

Veronica

[OakLeaf]

Runner's World, Running Times and Competitor Running usually have an assortment of interval workouts in each issue and online. I'm still learning for sure, but different workouts help build different body systems, so it's good to vary them - shorter intervals vs. longer ones, at various paces, and tempo runs.

[zoom-zoom]

More miles. Speed work is good, but most experts caution against it until a person has been logging 30 mile weeks for 6 months or more. I would not recommend anything more structured than a few fartlek intervals built into a workout or two every week.

How I know more miles is good -- I ran my personal slowest 5k this past weekend. Granted, I didn't go all out, but it was at a significantly slower pace than my half-marathon PR from a few years back. I set that PR about a month out from a marathon, when I was logging 50+ mile weeks. I was doing pretty much zero speed work, even then. That race wasn't even full effort, since I was treating it more as a long tempo run than a race. My 5k PR was the first leg of a duathlon. I've yet to run a real 5k race when my mileage is high enough to see what I'm really capable of.