Sprints are a fairly popular competitive event. It's part of track and field. 100/200/400 meters are all common sprint disciplines. 800 is sort of a sprint discipline. These competition distances are too short to provide much training benefit and you can't train at race effort 100% of the time. Competitive sprinters do a lot of volume (i.e., miles) at slower paces in addition to a lot of weight training.

> These competition distances are too short to provide much training benefit

?

"A typical Zátopek workout was 5×200, 20×400, 5×200 with 200m jogs in between. Over the years Zátopek increased his training load to include more and more repetitions getting up to 20×200, 40×400, 20×200 with 200 jogs for a workout."

5km is considered a short distance run. Within a few weeks, it's something that should be achievable in sub-20/25 minutes.

In the UK, there's a volunteer led organisation called parkrun which hosts 5km runs/races in over 1000 parks around the country every Saturday. It's quite popular. My local race consistently get 300+ entrants each week. Worth checking out: https://www.parkrun.org.uk/

5km, 10km, half marathon and marathon are the main running distances. Less than 5km is generally stuff run on athletics tracks, which falls under athletics.

> Within a few weeks, it's something that should be achievable in sub-20/25 minutes.

I wish it was that easy.

I trained hard for a year and barely made it under 24.

I guess it depends on age and if you are carrying around a bit of extra weight.

5K is a wonderful distance though. You can walk it in an hour, walk / jog it in 40, jog it in 30 .. then a whole world of gradual improvements and mind games open up to get you from there to 20 mins.

I've been running for years and my parkrun PB is just over 25 minutes, but I am also very overweight. I think, after a few weeks of Couch to 5K, getting anything under 35 minutes would be a big achievement.

It's just so much easier to improve your range than your speed.

Short distances are likely anaerobic, so a different kind of exercise from longer periods of exercise.

Anaerobic is evolved (as far as I know) as the "panic stations" exercise when it is 110% percent do-or-die situation and your body starts using inefficient no-oxygen metabolism because you need the extra energy to escape the chasing bear or whatever. It causes lots of lactic acid build up that hurts afterwards, and doing it a lot supposedly causes muscle issues unless you spend a lot of time warming down afterwards to help break it down.

Before I started running myself I remember looking at Marathon runners and thinking "Oh they are going so slow, it's just a matter of enduring it". And then I started running myself and realized that the professional Marathon runners are basically running at a pace that feels like sprinting to me.

And that's why I don't try 1500 or 3000m distances. They are just really, really fast and unbelievably painful. A few times a year I might do a 3K as fast as I can, and I dread it. Maintaining a near sprint pace for 10-12 minutes is just crazy hard.

Also, almost every time I get some kind of injury it's because I'm doing a high intensity (fast) run.

Try 4x4 minute interval training.

This video gives a quick summary —

https://vimeo.com/75764170

Here's the evidence based exercise advice —

https://www.ntnu.edu/cerg/advice