Strava Guide: How to Break Your 5K PR, With a Little Help From Strava

Hardloopsessie

August 13, 2024

Ask a lot of runners what the hardest distance is and you might be surprised at the answer. Sure, the marathon will be given its dues. As will the epic ultra distances. But it’s the 5K, a race of just 3.12 miles, that can be most challenging for runners, writes Katherine Turner.

Personally, the 5K is my favorite distance. You have to edge right up toward a pace that feels unsustainable, and then learn how to not push it over the edge. When you nail it, there’s no feeling like it. Most people who run, especially if you started as an adult, get comfortable going one pace and simply extending that pace for longer and longer distances. But there’s something invigorating, and almost childlike, about trying to simply go faster.

And, unlike a marathon, where runners will train for months only for something out of their control like poor weather or stomach cramps to derail their hopes, you can race a 5K weekend after weekend, gradually learning the event and getting faster while you’re at it. Plus, if you’re a busy person – which aren’t we all?! – training for the 5K requires a much more manageable and sustainable amount of training time than a marathon.

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Convinced? I sure hope so, because in this article, I’ll be helping you get 5K race ready. These are the three Strava features you should be using if you want to set a new 5K PR this summer.

Eyes on the Prize

If you think about a lot of the biggest things you’ve achieved in life – whether that’s getting top grades, saving for a mortgage or running a marathon, I’d bet they have one thing in common: You made achieving them a goal. If you want to run your best 5K, you’ll need some accountability. Luckily, Strava can be your own personal cheer squad/taskmaster thanks to the Goals feature.

To set a goal, navigate to the “You” tab and scroll down until you see the Goals module.
Tap “Add Goal” and you’ll see a menu with a few choices.
Choose “Run” as your activity and then I’d recommend choosing a weekly time frame for your goal. This means that every week you’ll have something to aim for and you won’t be able to say “I’ll do it tomorrow” too many times.

You might notice that the focus is on process goals, or goals that target self-improvement, through habits and behaviors that will help you achieve your performance goal, rather than the performance itself. We can’t always control outcomes – you might get sick just before race day or the weather might turn bad – but we can control our process. And this type of goal doesn’t set a limit on what you can achieve – you never know, you might be faster than you ever believed!

Personally, I like to set a weekly distance goal. Call me old school, but weekly mileage is a classic way for runners to measure progress and I find it satisfying to tally up the miles. But a time goal or activity goal might be a better fit if you like to mix in other forms of exercise like yoga, cycling or circuit training. Whatever you choose, make it achievable but challenging enough to keep you motivated.

Visualize Your Workouts

Okay, goal in place, it’s time to get to the business of getting faster. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: don’t sleep on speed. If you truly want to improve your 5K time, mixing tempo runs and interval workouts into your weekly schedule is the fastest way to get faster. Workout Analysis helps you visualize and understand that training by creating a visual breakdown of your activity’s lap data including distance, average pace, time, heart rate, and pace zone.

To use the feature, you will need a GPS watch capable of recording lap times, as Workout Analysis doesn’t work for autogenerated splits – these are the splits you get automatically each kilometer or mile on most watches and when you record using the Strava app.

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To nail the 5K, I’d recommend sprinkling in a mix of tempo runs, interval workouts and speed. A tempo is a continuous run of anything from 5-minute blocks to 30-minute blocks at a pace that’s comfortably hard. For example, you might be looking at 20 - 30 seconds per mile slower than your goal 5K race pace. Start with 3 - 4 x 5 minutes of tempo building up to 20 - 30 minutes continuous. Complement this with some slightly speedier interval-style workouts – things like 400m repeats on a track or 1 km repeats on the road are classics but you can get creative! Finally, add in some true speed in the form of hill strides or flat 20 - 30 second strides working on staying relaxed with good form while moving quickly.

Photography by: Drazen Zigic / Shutterstock

Once you’ve logged a workout, make sure you tag your activity as a “Workout” so Strava knows to generate a “Workout Analysis” data view for you. You’ll see your workout broken into laps, with each lap being represented by a bar. Tap on the bar to see the distance, pace, time, and pace zone of that lap. The darker the color, the faster you were moving. If you’re new to workouts, aim to keep the “on” bars, when you’re running an interval, fairly consistent, getting gradually faster as the workout progresses.

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And don’t forget to switch off the auto-lap feature on your watch. You don’t want your watch creating a lap mid-interval as that will mess up your pretty chart, and the analytics too.

Pace Perfection

If you read the above and are thinking to yourself, but where do I even start with workouts? Don’t worry, I’ve got you. Pace Zones are designed to help you with exactly that. They will help guide you as to what intensity and speed you should be running for different types of workouts based on your fitness.

To generate them, just go to the “You” tab and then tap your profile photo.
Click the “Edit” icon and then scroll down to the “Performance Potential” section. Here, you can add in a “Running Race Time” – this might be a recent race result or, if you haven’t raced recently, a target time – and Strava will do the rest.

Let’s take an example workout from above. Say you’ve decided to run a workout of 2 x 10 minutes tempo with an easy jog of two minutes between tempo blocks. If your goal 5K time is 30 minutes, you’d want to be running those 10-minute blocks at your Z3 Tempo pace of 9:48 - 10:55 per mile. Something just over 10-minutes per mile is probably your sweet spot. If you’re new to tempo running, you might find you need to run a little slower than the guide pace, but it’s a good starting point.