It’s no surprise that 5K races are increasing in popularity. They’re short enough for most people to be able to reach without an extreme level of training, they’re much less intimidating than things like marathons or triathalons, and they’re easier to organize. All which may have you thinking about running your first 5K.

Exactly how you are going to train for your first 5K is entirely dependent on your fitness level starting out, but here are some tips for anybody about to start prepping one.

Start Early

You want to get an early a start on training as you can. If you’ve got no health problems and aren’t seriously overweight, you can get yourself in good enough shape to run a 5K in thirty minutes or so in about twelve weeks.

If you’re already running, then you need a shorter period of time, but you should still try to start preparing for the race at about six weeks out. For the experienced runner, this going to consist of getting your pace down and making sure that you are healthy for the race.

Get the Right Shoes

You can probably run a 5K in just about any kind of footwear with minimal chance of injury. What you can’t do is do all the mileage needed to get ready without the right shoes, so go to a store that specializes in running shoes (so not Footlocker) and get them to set you up with the right shoes. It will make a world of difference in your preparation for the race.

Get Enough Rest Before the Race

What you don’t want to do is have your final training session the day before your race. Regardless of whether you are a beginner or an experienced runner new to competition, give yourself three days or so of rest before the race. This will ensure that your bones and muscles have had enough time to recover to get the best time that you can. You also want to make sure that you get plenty of sleep the night before the race, and if you can spend the day before doing nothing but relaxing, that’s going to help too.

Eat Well

Before you run your race, you’ll want to have a meal that’s high in protein and not likely to give you stomach problems, and light enough so that by the time you actually race you’re not feeling bloated. Basically, eat enough that you don’t have to think about what you’ve eaten when you’re racing. Hunger pains while running will not make anyone’s race go better, unless you’re chasing a steak.

Hydrate

5 kilometers is a little over three miles, and this will probably take you half an hour or less to run. You are not likely to get dehydrated in that time, so that’s not a big concern. What is a concern is how hydrated you are going into the race. Most people are chronically dehydrated, and it can make even a short race miserable, so make sure to get plenty of water and electrolytes in you before you race. You should also, er, make sure you hit the bathroom before the race starts, just in case.

Running starts out as a natural movement for human beings. Kids, after they learn to walk, run everywhere at top speed. Unfortunately, we tend to lose this as we get older and most of us, unlike kids, can’t just start running and let everything sort itself out. The body needs time to adapt to the demands of running after a long period without it, and this is doubly true if you’re carrying any extra weight.

Here are a few tips to ease into running so that you don’t get injured, make progress and maybe even have some fun.

Walk Before You Run

If you haven’t been going for daily walks, you need to do that first. Your bones, tendons and ligaments need to adjust before you can start stressing them with running. If you’ve been sedentary, spend at least a month walking at least five days a week, gradually adding distance, before you start running or jogging.

Stretch Often

One thing that tends to happen to us as we age and become more sedentary is that we lose flexibility. This happens to us even before we’re out of our teens. What this can lead to problems with your gait, which can lead to injury. Spend ten minutes or so three days a week stretching your whole body.

Lift Weights

Likewise, if you’ve been sedentary, you should do some resistance exercise before you start doing any running. This doesn’t need to be an Arnold Schwarzenegger style bodybuilding routine, but you do need to have stronger muscles to make sure you’re able to run well and avoid injury. At a minimum do a series of full body calisthenics, including pushups, squats and sit ups, two or three days a week.

Go for Time First

When you do start running, alternate running and walking and go for time rather than speed. For instance, aim for running and walking for thirty minutes, and then try to continually shift the balance to more running and less walking until you are doing a full thirty minutes running. Once you’ve worked up to that level you can start going for more distance or try to go further within your thirty minutes, depending on what you want to accomplish.

Don’t Rush It

More than anything else, the beginning runner needs to remember to not rush it. We are impatient, and we all have a tendency to want results right now. Unfortunately, the human body doesn’t work like that, and you can only push yourself so hard for so long without risking burnout.

A lot of people try to push them to do five or six miles or running on their first go and end up puking halfway there and then waking up the next morning barely able to get out of bed. Not surprisingly, quite a few of these people give up after that first run because they went too far, too fast.

You’re going to be running for a long time, so take a few weeks to get your body ready and build up to the real running. Your body will thank your for it and you will have a much better time getting in shape.

One of the biggest hurdles that any long time runner is going to face is burn out. Things are going great; you’re getting faster, you’re enjoying your runs and you have to hold yourself back from running too much. But then something changes, and you find that you’re getting slower, and running becomes a chore rather than something you’re loong forward to.

Burn out is actually usually a sign that you’ve been pushing too hard for too long, and your cumulative fatigue has gotten too great for your body to overcome. It can also mean that you’ve simply gotten as much as you are going to get out of your current training plan. Either way, you need to take steps to fix it or you are going to b subject to injury and stagnation.

Stop Running

Not forever. But if it’s been years since the last time you took so much as even a week off, then a period where you stay away from pounding the pavement for a week or two will go a long way to helping you get over burnout. You won’t lose any notable fitness over the course of a week or two, so you don’t need to worry about that, and the odds are good that you will actually find yourself fitter and faster some time off.

Cut Back on Volume

Related to the above, you should probably schedule some less stressful weeks every so often. Instead of not running, include a week of active recovery where you drop your mileage in half and slow your pace down slightly. If you include one every four to eight weeks, you can drastically extend the time you can train before burning out. A program designed with proper rest periods can actually stave off burn out and stagnation indefinitely.

Do Something Different

Just like it says; switch your running routine to something different. If you’ve been doing a lot of long slow distance work, go to shorter and faster runs. Or you can replace some of your running with cross training exercise like cycling or swimming. The key idea here is to give your body something fresh to adapt to and work different systems, which will kick you out of burn out mode.

Run in a Race

If your burnout is purely mental, in that you’re still get good results but you’re bored and don’t want to do it, sign up for a race using our couch to 5K program. Whatever length you like, but far enough off in the future that you have to train for it. You will find that having an actual competition in front of you will go a long way to putting the fire for running back in your spirit.

Do Whatever You Want

Get off the programs. Go out and run, for however long you like, for as far as you like. Don’t worry about times or mileage and just try to get back in touch with what you loved about running and what your body needs. A month of just playing with running can do wonders for burnout.

For a while after you start running, getting faster comes naturally. As your cardiovascular fitness and endurance increases, you will find yourself automatically picking up the pace. It would be nice if this natural acceleration would continue indefinitely, but it doesn’t. Eventually, you are going to start to level out as your speed and fitness plateau. If you want to continue to get fast after this point, you are going to have to add work to specifically develop more speed.

With that in mind, here are some things that help you get faster as fast as possible:

Turnover Matters

Turnover, basically, is how many times your foot hits the ground in 60 seconds. This is an important part of your pace, and if you can train yourself to get more footstrikes per minute, you will get faster.

You can measure your turnover by counting how many times one of your feet hits the ground in a minute, although you might want to recruit a friend to run the stopwatch. There’s no real trick to improving turnover, you just need to focus on getting more footstrikes in.

Get Stronger

Strength matters, even in running. The harder you can push off with every step, the faster you are going to be overall. Running guru Percy Cerutty was one of the early proponents of weightlifting for runners, and the principle remains true.

Ideally, you want to gain strength without gaining weight, so you need to keep your reps low and focus on continually increasing the weights you use. If you do this right, you will notice an increase in speed almost immediately.

Run Hills

This is actually another way to get stronger, and it works well in conjunction with resistance training. You are working against gravity while you run, and this causes a direct increase of strength in the muscles you use to run.

Find a hill where you can for about a hundred yards, at an incline that is challenging but impossible. Work up to running up (and walking back down) the hill 10 times, once a week. You don’t want to do too much hill running, as it can affect your motor patterns for your regular runs.

Sprint for Speed

A little science: you body basically has two energy systems, the aerobic, which uses oxygen as fuel, and the anaerobic, which doesn’t need oxygen. The faster you run relative to your max, the more you shift into the anaerobic. While you can condition yourself to run pretty much forever in the aerobic zone, you can only go so long in the anaerobic.

If you include sprints in your workout, you train your anaerobic system, and increase the threshold at which you switch over. Basically, this allows you to run faster, farther, which is good stuff. Like hill runs, you’ll want to a mile or so of sprints, preferably 400s, once a week, not too close to your hill runs.

There are other, more complicated ways to run faster, but these basics will increase the speed of any runner, regardless of experience level.

If you’re old enough, you may be able to remember when Heavyhands was an honest to god craze. About twenty five or thirty years ago, people started showing up to run with these little hand weights that had handles attached to them so that were easier to hold than, say, dumbbells.

The idea was that you would swing the weights while you walked or run, and you would get twice the workout in the same amount of time. The idea was developed and popularized by Leonard Schwartz, a middle aged doctor who was looking for something other than running to get his cardio in, and it was a good idea.

Of course, it didn’t work. The craze came and went, and for the most part, the little Heavyhands weight found a resting place in closets, never to be used again. This was not actually Dr.Schwartz’s fault, to be fair, and there is a lot of merit in what he had to say.

The problem was is that Heavyhands were supposed to give you a vigorous arm workout, but this required actually swing the weights while you ran or walked, keeping a steady pace. This is what you were supposed to do, but it isn’t what most people actually did. Instead, they just carried the weights as they ran.

Now, if the Heavyhands weight were fifty-pound beasts, this might have worked, but since they only weighed a pound or two, the effect was negligible and people soon quit using them. Much like the Atkins diet, most of the people doing Heavyhands had never actually read the book.

This is a shame, because Schwartz was on to something. He did meticulous research into how pumping hand weight affected oxygen uptake and energy burn, and his personal results were impressive.

The highest VO2 maxes in the world tend to be held by rowers and cross-country skiers, both of whom use all their limbs for their sport. This led Schwartz to reason, correctly, that using the arms would allow you to build your cardio system in a whole new way.

This is good stuff for the serious runner. This allows you to continue to build your cardiovascular endurance without endless speed work or infinitely increasing mileage. Instead, with the hand weights correctly used, you can radically improve your ability to get oxygen into your system, which will in turn radically improve your running.

What you probably shouldn’t do is run with the Heavyhands weights. If you do, and you’re a competitive runner, you’re going to mess up your biomechanics for the actual races, which is not something that anyone wants.

Instead, replace some of your mileage for at least six weeks or so with Heavyhands walking at as brisk a pace as you can manage, while swinging the weights to forehead height or so. This is going to be a lot harder than it sounds, but it can add a lot wind to your lungs and a lot of speed to your runs faster than you can say Heavyhands.

Dan Gable, legendary Olympic wrestler and coach, once said, “If something is important, do it every day. If it’s not important, don’t do it.” There’s a lot of truth to that, because a lot of what we do, even with running, involves honing skills that only come with hours of practice.

In fact, it’s said to take ten thousand hours of practice to truly be considered a master at something. That’s two hours of training a day for fourteen years, which is a lot of work and dedication. But, you know, there’s something to be said for the idea of less is more. It’s actually possible to get better at running without running.

At least, for controlled periods. You can’t expect to not run for years and then suddenly come back and smash your previous records, but a short period away from pounding the pavement can actually be just the thing to bust you through a plateau. The trick is that you have to be able to do it right.

Runners notoriously have the some of the highest injury rates in athletics. While these are not generally as dramatic as Joe Theisman’s femur getting snapped like a twig by Lawrence Taylor, it is an insidious problem that will creep up on many if not most runners at some point.

The trouble is repetitive stress, where the body repeats the same action over and over and over. While practice is necessary and good, you can easily get too much of a good thing by doing the same thing all the time, every time. Think of office workers who eventually need surgery because of typing, now imagine the pounding your knees and ankles take.

Even beyond the damage repetitive stress is doing to your body, there’s also the fact of accumulated fatigue. Virtually anyone who trains to get better, which everyone who takes running even a little seriously, is going to be fatiguing their body little by little, in ways that aren’t obvious except over the long term.

The answer to all of this is to stop running. Now, obviously, you should be just sitting on the couch instead of running, although there is something to be said for the rejuvenating effects of vegging out for a week or two every year or so.

No, instead you’ll want to replace your running with another hard aerobic activity for six weeks or so every so often. The best time to do this is right after a hard race, to give your body some time to rest and recover.

Try to pick and activity that will keep your lungs and legs in shape while giving them a new stress to adapt to. Try running stairs exclusively, or taking up biking for a while. The trick is that you need to work hard.

If you do it right, you find that when you come back to running you will be able to with a lot more vigor and energy then you previously had, and you may even gain the momentum needed to hit some brand new personal records.