Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Ah, the planning stages

No word on the the River to River yet (hopefully we should be finding out this week). Although I knew going in that this race fills fast, I will be newly impressed should we get closed out; Rob submitted our team registration five minutes after the deadline. So anyway, nothing has been set in stone yet, but I've been working on a base mileage program designed to crank my weekly totals up bit by bit until I average 40 mpw by the end of January, when the training for Sunburst would begin.

The basic pattern I followed is this: long run Sunday, easy/medium run Monday, off or easy Tuesday, tempo workout Wednesday, easy/medium Thursday, off Friday, medium Sunday. The first week was last week in which I ran 24.7 miles. I'm following the old 10% rule to raise the mileage, so I'm shooting for about 27 this week. Every third week will be a cutback week. I'll peak at 50 in January, then a cutback week and then marathon training starts. If I can stay on this program, I'll be more well-prepared than ever before to start a training program.

Of course, if we don't make into River to River, this may all be revamped. But I really, really like the idea of the gradual mileage build-up, and how much easier that will make marathon training thereafter. So I might keep this schedule no matter what. In the training cycle I just finished, I did a spectacularly bad job of following Pfitz's schedule, so hopefully this winter and spring I can do a little better. I know things are going to get a little harder next weekend when we fall back and it'll pretty much be dark by the time I BEGIN my run. Yuck.

1 comment:

Al Durham said...

Soon headlamps and relflective vests will be mandatory all on morning and evening runs.