With four days to go to the 247Moneybox.com 5k Santa run, our legs have been going great guns, with training up to four times a week. If you’re like me, you want to be a better, stronger, healthier, and, most of all, FASTER runner.

However, after work – after family commitments, daily errands, and keeping up with piles of washing – how are we supposed to fit in enough good workouts to reach our goal (becoming the next Haile Gebrselassie obviously)? It’s one of the greatest challenges we part-time runners face. Thankfully, due to flexible working hours, staff at 247Moneybox.com have had four weeks of preparation to train for our 5K run (plenty of time).

Take a look at our training log: Week 1 – Brisk 5-minute warm-up walk;  then a 15-minute walk followed by a 10-minute sprint, for a total of 30 minutes. Week 2 – Brisk 5-minute warm-up walk; then 15 minutes of jogging and 20 minutes of walking, totalling 40 minutes. Week 3 – Brisk 5-minute warm-up uphill walk; then a 30-minute jog and a 15-minute walk, for a total of 50 minutes. Week 4 – Brisk 5-minute walk; then a 1-hour jog followed by a 10-minute warm-down walk, for a total of 1 hour 15 minutes.

So this gruelling lead-up to the run has put us in a great position to do full justice to ourselves and the 247Moneybox.com team. We’ve been losing pounds as quickly as we have been loaning them out, and now is the time, as we enter the home straight, to really upgrade our training to the “express service”!