Posts Tagged ‘Hal Higdon’

Glad to say, I’m truly happy to be training again.  I’ve been messing with the schedule, tweaking it like mad, but only by adding miles. I like the way the simple workouts look for now, so no edits for those aside from the mileage padding.  That might change as we get closer to the race because 6 or 8×800 (Yasso, hello) would probably be happier morphing into the same distances worth of 1200s or 1000s, but for now…all good.

This is what I’ve tentatively got on tap for the month of January. Here’s the original plan so you can see how it compares. I’ve entered on week 4.

What I've got planned plus what I've done up till Jan. 5th.

I took an extra day off on Sunday because it was 12 degrees windchill with 30mph winds and I was all, “screw this, training starts tomorrow!”  So that was my last day of  vacation.

Today’s run was 4 x 1/4 mi hill repeats, 9.4 miles total.  I had a great time doing them though it was cold and windy (21 windchill, admittedly not quite as bad as many of you have it).  The only crappy part was coming home and seeing the last time I did reps on that hill, I did 7 of them and was 30 seconds faster.  But it was 62 degrees that day and 3 weeks out from Philly.  Plus, I’ve been running easy for the last 6 weeks, so I’m fine with it.

I had a funny mini-freakout after I read Robert’s comment on the last post “Only three 20’s all training period?”  Suddenly, I was scrambling to add another 20, then I realized how silly it was.  There is nothing magical about a 19 vs. a 20 (if we lived in Europe, we’d be doing 30k Long Runs…18.4 miles) so for all intents and purposes, three 20s and a 19 make for 4 proper long runs.  Looks fine to me.  Besides, my lovely 22,22,24 and 20 for Philly didn’t even get put to the test since I started walking at mile 18.

More important to me is putting mid-long runs in there for general endurance.  Though ok, I penciled in a tentative extra 20 in there if the weather’s great and I feel like it, but probably not.

February at this point looks like 52 (cutback),63,69,73, then March will be 60 (cutback), 73, 54 (Shamrock Half), 74 and then April’s first week is 60, then taper.  I’ll still be messing around as it goes, but this gives you an idea of how I’ve modified the mileage.

On the Heart Rate front, it continues to be wonky, but I’ve now accepted it as a permanent part of the picture.  Instead of lamenting and comparing the past, I’m going to wear it but use the current readings as baseline.  As long as it shows natural  improvement with the passing weeks, everything’s A-OK.  The underlying quandary I’ve had has been whether to slow my runs down to make for a “better” HR.  But they’d end up being slower than last January when I was a much slower runner, so I’m using effort as the main guide and the monitor to note  trends.

That’s it for now, I’ll be back for more blather in a few days.  Have some fabulous runs!

It’s no secret, I’ve been in bad attitude land with Marathon training; it’s cold and windy and I haven’t felt like putting forth real effort yet.  But I’ve been working my way back.

One of the things I started yesterday was to add 3 MP miles to my run.  I was severely lacking in race pace miles last time and that’s something  I want to correct this time out.  I figured I’d add a bit each week, next week do 5, the next week do 8, etc.  Seemed a good way to ingrain the pace without any stress.

Meanwhile, the days are ticking by and I needed to get a plan underway, so today I bought Pfitzinger’s second edition of Advanced Marathoning.  I used his first edition for Steamtown and had heard this new one had more MP miles, so I pretty much decided that’s what I’d use.

But when I finally looked at the plan and saw that there were exactly 4 MP runs and the first one should have been last week and was 8 miles at MP (8 MP in week 16?) I wasn’t happy.  Seems like 8 MP so early in the game would be better replaced by a tempo run, since it’s going to feel about as sucky anyway and give more physiological benefit.  But I digress.

More importantly, I don’t want to reserve MP miles for “special”  and with only four of them (3 actually, since I already missed one) it qualifies as that, because for me at this time, that would defeat the purpose of doing them.  I italicize that because I’m sure if I’d have picked up the book 6 months ago, I’d have no quibble with 4 big MP runs (save for the natural dread involved), but at this point they only look like drudge workouts.  Besides, I don’t want to dread MP runs, I want to get used to them so it ain’t no big deal, that’s my whole goal here.

Then I remembered ole Hal Higdon.  I’ve always dismissed his plans for looking too simplistic: they don’t have “cycles”, the mileage is low, the workouts are basically the same thing with more reps each week.  However, one thing I’ve always thought was pretty cool was that he has MP runs almost every Saturday before the LR, which works two-fold, you get your MP miles while at the same time it tuckers you out a bit for Sunday’s LR, the better to give you that marathon feeling.  And he even has some mid-week MP runs as well.  All told, he has 17 MP runs in an 18-week plan!  And they graduate from short to longer, just like I wanted to do.

So I started looking longer at his Advanced Plan II and wonder of wonders…the spark began to return.  His simplicity was suddenly a fantastic thing in my eyes: I could easily add mileage to it, the fact that it alternates tempo, hill and intervals each week while adding an additional short tempo or pace run a couple days later seemed perfect, plus, I’m going to keep some rest days in there.  It was exactly a year ago that I went to 7 days, but marathon training in the winter is going to annoy me double, so having a day off for especially windy/crappy days will be a treat.

And only three 20s instead of 4.  Will I be under prepared?  I don’t think so, those MP runs are going to be a great help.  My pal RedDogRunning from the 3:20 thread just used it (only did two 20s, matter of fact) and had a huge PR last week – said those MP runs made him feel “locked into pace the whole way”.  Music to my ears.

So I feel like training again!  No longer overwhelmed or dreading it, the little thrill was back when I transcribed the numbers and notes into my Excel calendar (and I did this twice today…the Pfitz time wasn’t so joyful).  Thank god, because I was seriously wondering how I was going to get through the next 4 months doing something I didn’t want to do.

Yay.  Just yay.