This beginner to intermediate workout plan has 8 weeks of slow and steady build up towards a 9th week where you can take it easy to rest up for a 5k race or fitness test/time trial. It has plenty of room for recovery and is a relatively low volume plan.

This plan should be great for you if you want to feel confident about running a fast 5k, and you haven't done any particularly hard or structured training lately, or maybe ever. Presumably you've been running at least 2-3 days per week most weeks, and feel comfortable running 4-5k at a time, you haven't been doing hard workouts lately, and want to comfortably ramp up to get fitter and faster over 8 weeks.

For the modest amount of training time that's planned, you should be able to go into a 5k race or time-trial with good fitness, and ready to do a hard effort that you're satisfied with.

At the end of this plan, you should still feel like you've taken your fitness up a level, _and_ that you have plenty of room to keep ramping up towards other goals farther out, whether it's a faster 5ks or moving up to a fast 10k. The volume is pretty low, though, so if you want to move up to something longer than a 10k any sooner than 4-6 weeks after the conclusion of this plan, then you'll want to include some easy rides or runs on most or all of the optional days so that you're getting at least 5 days of aerobic conditioning most weeks.

Each week there are 3 runs, 1 bike ride, and some core work. Monday is scheduled as a rest day. Wednesday and Friday are recovery days with the option to rest or do an easy bike ride. You could do an easy run on those days instead, if you prefer, but the plan is intended to keep the stress on your legs pretty modest to keep your risk of injury down and allow for ample recovery. Along these lines, doing some easy rides on Wednesdays and Fridays may be appealing, because there's no impact on the legs and the overall stress of an easy ride under an hour is pretty low, making them very well tolerated by most athletes and generally pretty therapeutic for the running legs.

Since the overall volume isn't huge and individual sessions aren't very long, you shouldn't have to worry much about your nutrition during the runs. It may be useful sometimes to have some drink mix or a gel handy for some of the moderate to harder workouts, but there's no need to overthink it or worry about running out of energy. It's great if you can go into most of these training sessions comfortable, without being either very hungry or full from a recent meal.

If it's warm and you're sweating a lot, hydration will matter more over the course of a 30-60m run, so pay attention to your thirst and have some electrolyte mix if you're really sweating a lot, either during or after or both, especially if you're riding for a few hours on the weekend general endurance ride after the Saturday run workout.