I took advice from my last post's comments and I let myself recover a little better and minimized the high intensity runs to about once a week. I also updated my routine to better fit my goal currently. For background I'm 17M and my goal is to run 5 miles continuously in under 40 minutes. The issue is that I had never run a day in my life before and while in the gym I am strong and have good explosiveness/relative strength (timed around 12 seconds on my 100m), my actual cardio itself is horrible. If I'm not doing high intensity short bursts of running I'm basically dead weight. I started running seriously about 3 months ago and when I first started it was with my initial goal but I thought that I ought to split my running training in phases, starting with addressing my weak points that being my aerobic capacity and then after a few months of getting my endurance better pivoting towards anaerobic efficiency and speed runs. This means for the first few months of my training its just going to be zone 2 endurance runs. My first run 3 months ago was at a pace of 14 minutes per mile (z2) and I could run this before my heart rate spiked about 6 minutes in and I had to walk. 3 months later my z2 pace is still 14 minutes a mile but as I've trained for my endurance has gotten better, I recently ran a PR of around 3.6 miles (although I have to run in intervals of 10 minutes running and 2 walking since its about 100 degrees and 75 dew point here, + cardiac drift). My main concern though is that my pace has not increased at all, zone 2 still feels about as difficult as it always has I just don't get into zone 3 as fast as I used to despite it being the same heat and stuff. Another thing is that my weaknesses are really weird since like I said my sprints are exceptional I mean if I really push myself I run about a 7 minute mile but I physically cannot push past 1 mile without it feeling like I'm dying, hence the endurance training.
Basically, I'm worried I'm not progressing properly since after 3 months of endurance runs I'm still just as slow in my zone 2, the only improvements I've seen are in the distance I can run before crashing. I'll paste my routine below:
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Monday - Threshold zone 2 run under 160 bpm at about 12:45 pace. Progression is 27 minutes of running and every 2 weeks I add 2 more minutes.
Wednesday - Pacing ladder where I run 8 sets of 400m runs at an 11:20 pace with a 90 second walk break in between, my fastest run of the week and highest zone aswell. Each week I add a set.
Friday - Hardest run where I run my benchmark run of around 36 minutes of zone 2 then I take a 5 minute walk break and run for 14 more minutes. I progress by decreasing the time of my walk break and by adding around 2 minutes to my second run every 2 weeks
Saturday - My benchmark run which is about 36 minutes at zone 2 and in intervals of 9 minutes running (5 minutes more than when i first started 3 months ago) and 2 minutes of walking. If i dont incorporate the walk breaks my bpm quickly starts to spike to 160+ bpm even at a slow shuffle because even at midnight its about 100 degrees and very humid here, but over time Ive been able to eliminate the walk breaks and run for longer. my progression is by adding 2 minutes to my benchmark and by adding 1 minute to my active running time per interval every 2 weeks.
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I've been doing this for a bit now and I don't get shin splints or tendon pain or anything and I even have it so that every 4 weeks I stall progress for 2 weeks so my body can catch up, but even then I don't see any significant progress in my zone 2 efficiency and I still feel sluggish and weak in my cardio ability. Plus when I see a lot of online posts talking about how it only took like 1-2 months for them to shave minutes off their zone 2 pace by doing basically what I'm doing now, I get a little discouraged in my progress. So some guidance would be much appreciated.
