Prior to boot camp I ran a 11:30~ 1.5 mile and it was rough. My last PFT I ran 20:15~. We didn’t actually do that much distance running if I recall correctly. Farthest we ever ran was probably 5 miles, but we did a lot of shorter distance 2 miles~, and actually did a fair amount of sprinting at 400-800m. In addition to incentive training which included lots of ladder sprints.
A lot of these last comments really fit your criteria. I’m going to go against the grain and mention some of my own experiences.
Like amayakyrol, at in-processing for OCS last summer, I ran a 19:20 3-mile run. By the end of roughly 4-5 weeks of hard run training, I ran a 17:57. Now, the training environment was pretty brutal, I lost quite a bit of weight, and most of my training runs had been in boots which made sneakers feel like nothing, but I honestly feel that intervals are the best way to decrease 5k times with low mileage. That’s how I went from a 22:30 to a 19:20 before I left.
While the volume was much, much, much lower, I followed the same type of training as Bannister that was mentioned earlier- Hard intervals run at or below my goal of a 10 mph pace (6 min mile) with roughly an equal amount of rest. A workout I loved was 1-800m run in 3:00 (3:00 rest), 2-400m run in 1:20 (1:40 rest), and 4-200m in :35 (:55 rest). Super hard and I had to work up to it, but it made me feel great and improved my running a lot.
Another type of interval training that paid incredible dividends, both in my preparation and while at OCS, are military fartleks. As opposed to the traditional “speed play” fartleks most runners know, a military fartlek involved running various intervals (anywhere from 200-800m) and then stopping to do a BW exercise (pull ups, push ups, abs, box jumps, bench dips ect). During the BW exercise, your heart-rate has a chance to decrease, actually letting you “rest” a little bit. The constant change of heart BPM gives you an incredible workout. I used to do 2-3 miles with a break every 400-600m to do the exercises. Once you adapt to the new stimulus, you can keep a slightly higher pace than you usually would for a run of that distance, which makes it great to work up to a higher pace.
Sprints also helped, if just to work on going faster. This includes hill sprints.
So if you do one fartlek run, one interval run, and one longer (4-6 mile( run a week, with a day of sprints thrown in somewhere, you’ll see fantastic improvements in your pace. I ran my 19:20 only doing 12 miles a week prior to training, and then saw my time drop to sub 18:00 running 2-3 times a week, averaging less than 3 miles a run and doing no more than 5. Get the intensity up instead of worrying so much about distance. In the grand scheme of things, a 5k is really not “long distance” running. You don’t need to run 10-20x more than your competing.
UFI nailed it. If you want to run fast, you have to…run fast. That means intervals, fartlek, etc.
<---------15:27 for 3 miles cross country