Seventeen weeks seems like a super long time, but when it comes to marathons it’s (usually) just enough time to get down to business. I feel a little unprepared to “officially” start training, mostly due to running a fairly unplanned marathon a month ago and trying to slowly get back into the swing of things. I haven’t really thought through a specific plan other than the fact that I’m still going to do a weekday workout (usually Tuesdays) and a workout within my long run on the weekend. This seems to work pretty well and gives enough time for recovery between the two.
I’ve always had trouble figuring the types of workouts to do and when, but with knowledge from Coach John, the Jack Daniels Running Formula book and a recent article in Running Times, I think I have more of an idea of how the succession of workouts should happen.
1. Base building/volume – DONE
2. Strength/hills – NOW
3. Speed via short intervals – in the next 2-4 weeks
4. Strength and speed via tempo runs, VO2 max workouts – August
5. Marathon-specific speedwork – September
I may loosely follow this kind of schedule while gradually increasing my mileage and making two distinct changes from my last training cycle:
- REST One of my goals for this training cycle is to prevent an injury from happening like last time, and am going to make rest days a priority. I had substituted an easy run for a weekly rest day a bunch of times when I was training in the winter/spring, and I don’t think it gave my body proper time to recover and rebuild from long runs, workouts, etc. in the long run.
- STRENGTH Since my injury, I’ve been keeping up with a good schedule of PT exercises and lifting to build strength in my quads, hamstrings, glutes, arms and core. I feel a lot stronger and my knee is feeling good – I figure a plan like this can only help prevent those little weaknesses that can easily turn into an injury.
It feels good to have some kind of plan outlined now! Yesterday I did my first long run with a small workout, and think it went pretty well.
5, 10, 10, 5 workout: warm-up (this time I did ~40 minutes), then 5 minutes at between 10K and half marathon pace, 3 minutes easy, 10 minutes at ~half marathon pace, 5 minutes easy, 10 minutes at half pace, 4 minutes easy, 5 minutes at between 10K and half pace, cooldown (~30-40 minutes)
I like this workout because the last repeat is usually pretty hard, and it teaches you to push when the legs are feeling tired. This is what I need to focus most on, and while I didn’t exactly hit goal paces, it gave me a good starting point. Here’s to a great seventeen weeks!