The Final Sharpener Before Sunday
If you are four days out from your main event, the time for building fitness has well and truly passed. I see plenty of ambitious age groupers get a bit twitchy this close to the race. They start worrying they have not done enough, so they head out and smash a session that leaves them cooked. That is the quickest way to ruin months of hard yakka.
At this stage, your training needs to be short and surgical. The goal is to keep the legs snappy and remind the body what race pace feels like without actually taxing the engine. I reckon a twenty-five minute session is the sweet spot. You start with a ten minute warmup that is so easy it feels like you are barely moving. You just want to get the joints lubricated and the blood flowing.
The meat of the session is three intervals of three minutes at your target race pace. Give yourself a full minute of walking between each one to keep the heart rate under control. This is not about pushing the limits. It is about neurological priming. You are just flicking the switch so your brain and your muscles remember the rhythm they need to hold on Sunday.
Wrap it up with a five minute cooldown and get straight into your recovery. You are not looking for gains here, you are looking for readiness. If you finish this feeling like you could have done ten more reps, you have done it perfectly. Save that hunger for the race course. Keep it simple, keep it short, and trust the work you have already put in.