Ok let's talk training plan. As I've stated before, I'm big fan of Hal Higdon's training plans, all available for free on his website. It's probably because they fell right in my mileage level that I liked them from the beginning.
Could they be more complicated? Sure, but they fit the bill for my level of running right now. They have some speedwork sessions, many easy runs and one long run a week. Sure some of his plans call for 6 runs a week but I don't mind that since many are kinda shorter easy runs that I can do before going to work.
I've shared bits and pieces of some Hal Higdon plans but here's the plan I used to get ready for my half marathon back in May:
That plan is basically Higdon's advanced half marathon training plan with very minor variations. His original plan called for a long run of 2 hours on the Sunday of week 11, one week before race day. I thought I wanted a better taper than to go out and run for longer than what I thought my half marathon would take, at a pace that would mean nothing a week later. I at first had modified it for 14K at race pace and eventually ended up with a 2+2+2+2+2 run which was twice 2 km at race pace splitted with three 2 km at an easy pace.
That was a pretty big leap of fait for me as it meant 6 days of running every week but I really enjoyed how the plan was built. Starting with short intervals, some hills at first and working toward more work at HM pace, I liked that. Since I started that training cycle in mid February, and with the kind of winter we've had this year, I did about 75% of my runs in the first 10 weeks on the treadmill and only one on the treadmill in the last two weeks. Other than the whole crashing down thing, that plan worked quite well.
There were no local races for me to test my pacing so I did some self paced test on the Sundays were a race was to be run. Not exctly teh same but it worked out all right there too.
I had a whole 16 weeks of marathon training planned for a marathon on August 24th. This all went down the drain when I crash in my HM so back to the drawing board I went. I liked that HM plan so much, I decided to use it again but had to modify it somewhat, first to accomodate for races I'd already signed up for, then to up the mileage a bit. Here's what I'll be going with, starting from this Monday:
The first two races I'm signed up for. The 13.5K staircase challenge is something I will go into with absolutely no exectation but to do my very best. I mean, just like that trail race of two weeks ago, it's so out of the normality of things, there's no way for me to plan a pace. We'll be doing some running in between flights of stairs in the Old Quebec. Will be pretty amazing but no way of knowing how I might place or how fast I'll go overall. As for the 5K, it'll be my first organized 5K race since I started running. It's a pretty local race, about 10 minutes from our home and it's held on a Friday evening.
That 10K, I've yet to pull the trigger on. It's very tempting and I will quite probably register for it in the coming week or so. You can see I have upped the Monday/Wednesday easy runs from 5 km to 7 km (basically added about a mile) and Monday's will now be recovery runs in which I'll try to keep my heart rate below 110 BPM and my easy runs around 120-125 BPM. I've also added some reps to some of the speedwork session and for the moment have scratched the hills session that was planned on the Tuesday following the staircase challenge as I fully expect to be sore after that one. Things might change if I'm not feeling too bad.
That's about how the rest of my Summer will be happening. Was back on the treadmill this morning. Almost a shame too, as the weather was very nice outside but had that hills workout planned and since it's mostly flat around the neighborhood and I didn't feel like driving 15 minutes at 5:30 for the nearest hill, I decided to do the training on the belt. 7x 300m @ 15% incline followed by 7x 300m @ -3% (decline) got me pretty sweaty. Still feeling the effect of the weekend's downhill race...
FM