Posts Tagged ‘training plans’

This’ll be a short one because I’ve gotta rush off to a narration job which, ironically enough if you read the last post, is about rhinoplasty.  I now know way more about that procedure than I ever wanted.

Speaking of  “if you read the last post”, I was impressed by how many actually did.  Around 700 unique readers, which is a lot for a post where I don’t go to the hospital or have some other kooky crappy escapade.  I got so many cool comments, both on here and on Facebook that I wanted to thank you folks for taking the time to read the thing and also, that I love how alike so many of our experiences are.  Makes the world a smaller place, for sure.

Training
I thought it’d be a good time to compare my original training plan with what I’ve done so far.  Because the weather has been an unyielding bitch since June, some of the workouts were adjusted, made shorter or slower, or run on different days to chase a cooler temp.  I also had the hamstring incident that added an extra rest day and forfeited some hard running.

Today’s workout was changed, btw, twice.  Adam noted that 6×1000@5k was going to be too tough, so make it 5×1000, but then when I cried Help! because the heat index at 6am was going to be low 80s, he took pity on me and made it 12×400 with generously long recoveries (2min).  I loved it!

Click on it for full-size.  The original plan is on the left, starting with July 12th and goes through this week.  I know it’s a bit confusing, just note that the workouts are written above the days and each week’s total mileage is to the right, outside of the calendar days.

For Ilana
Sweet Ilana lives in the cool recesses of Colorado and enjoys gloating over her 50 degree weather on Facebook.  She contemplates wearing a jacket and will be in snowshoes the next time she checks in.  So today, when I returned from my 8.5 miles, I wrung out my sports bra and shorts just for her – a nice, thick, white sweat so she could share some summer love with the rest of us whiners.  Goes great in coffee, too.

A little over an hour's running and this is what my clothes had to show for it.

And that’s it for now.  Gotta dash off and talk about Alsarraf septorhinoplasty and mucoperichondrium now, because I’m cool like that.  Have a nice Wednesday, all.

That was weird.  I get to the park this morning and find myself in the tail end of a 5K.  Who schedules a 5K at 7am Wednesday morning?  Stinkin’ hot, too.  But on to the good stuff…

My Training Plan
It’s here, it’s here!!  My Half plan for the philadelphiadistancerockandrunhalfmararoll, formerly known as the Philadelphia Distance Run on Sept. 19th.

During my week off, I  Half-fashioned a Half training plan under the guidance of mentor (coach?) Adam/A Muse who patiently refined and shaped it into a really swell, kick-ass plan.  I can’t thank him enough for working on it and hope to do him proud come September.  Thank you, Adam!

The plan is based on an article about periodization (for marathons actually, but applicable to the Half, as well) where Base is followed by a Speed phase, then a Strength phase.

Now, I haven’t followed a periodized plan since I did Pfitzinger’s 18/55 two years ago.  Since then, I’ve used either Hudson’s canned plans, which don’t have real defined phases, or I rolled my own without any thought about that stuff.  I mean, I always knew I should be thinking in those terms, but wasn’t really understanding how to go about it till now.

Base: a no-brainer.  This one is abbreviated because I have a strong base already, just need to build back easily after the heat drama, so nothing hard this week except for a progression run.  The following two weeks include rudimentary quality to get me prepped for the Speed phase.

Speed: this phase features 5K pace interval sessions and tempos mostly at 10k pace.  There are also a couple miler workouts from this great article Adam sent my way.  The tempo intervals on Aug. 6th will be my first taste of Half pace and establishes a baseline.

Strength: this portion focuses on 10k strength workouts. As Salazar says about Half training, “…it’s 75 percent the same as 10K training.”  Also, in addition to the 10k fun, starting in the Speed phase and ramping up through Strength are a good number of race pace runs, very important.

Long Runs: most of these will be on my local trail which gives me a hillier route than usual.

Recovery: this may be listed here after all the fun stuff, but it was the first thing I penciled in.  Recovery (or lack of) has been on my mind a lot these days; my cavalier attitude about it, how I rarely took cutback weeks and when I did, the mileage cut was meager.  No more.

This plan has two major cutback weeks on each end of the Speed phase with a 30% reduction in mileage.  That means taking two days off in each of those weeks.  Seems excessive, but my instinct tells me it’s the right thing to do.

To bolster my point: my friend Jeff is an accomplished, hardcore cyclist, podiums all the time.  A few weeks ago at a bike race, he and the entire 40-45 AG were beat out by a 63-year old, and by a sizable margin!  He spoke to Jeff after the race and told him his success is all about recovery, especially before races.  And he never puts in miles “just to put in miles”, everything has a purpose.  This is nothing I haven’t heard before but this time…I’m listening.

Enough jabber, here’s the plan, full size.
Joking. Click for hugeness.

Two more items worth mentioning, nutrition and sleep:

Nutrition: I already eat cleanly, so no problems with this.  The cookie gorging finished a few weeks ago, then dessert became cereal before morphing this week into fruit salad, which is really weird because I’ve never been a big fruit eater – suddenly I love it.  Yay me.

Sleep: I’ve been as stupid about this as recovery.   I have to stop going to sleep after midnight  if I’m going to get out early to run.  I end up tired all summer.  Will amend this starting tonight.  11pm or bust.

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.

I didn’t get a chance to wish everyone a happy holiday, sorry about that.  I had a great couple of days with friends, hope you all had fun, too.

Yesterday should have started my Boston cycle.  I like 16-week cycles and always get excited when I start a new one, but I’m having a really hard time wrapping my head around marathon training again.  Racing in any form is not appealing to me at all right now.

Philly fucked me up.  I’ve lost a huge chunk of confidence and I’m not sure when it’s coming back.  It’s one thing to fuck up a race, it’s another to have absolutely no clue as to why it happened or what to adjust so it doesn’t happen the next time.  Those last miles are etched on my brain indelibly with no signs of dimming, and this is the first time in my running life that I don’t have hope.

I’m supposed to sign up for the Shamrock Half in March with my gal pals but I’m not feeling it.  Chicago, which I’d said I wanted to do because the course is fabulous and it’d be another huge social event, is sounding to me like just another chance to bomb in a major way.  I’m thinking I probably should stick with Boston as my one marathon this year since even that is tinged with dread.

So here I am, 16 weeks from Boston and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed.  I started doing fartleks this week because I need to get my legs moving but it’s hard to imagine wanting to do quality sessions again.  I know it’s stupid but I feel like all those tempos and intervals betrayed me last cycle so putting out the effort now doesn’t seem worth it.  I’ll get over it, I’m sure.

As for what to do, this being the first time I’ve hit 16-weeks out without a plan firmly in place, if I follow Hudson, you’re supposed to adjust each cycle to tweak what was lacking in the previous one, but frankly, I don’t know what that is!  I don’t know what went wrong and what was right.  Maybe I’ll just buy Pfitzinger’s 2nd edition of Advanced Marathoning so I don’t have to think about it and can just follow blindly.  I don’t have the energy for much more than that right now.

Yesterday was Vova’s funeral which ended up being a wonderful day-long affair with a luncheon for 40 and a boozy party afterwards.  He would have loved it, the sweetie.

Occasionally I link to music on this blog and while my main favorite genre is Alternative, I’m a sucker for any style so long as there’s a great hook or a beautiful melody.  Nick made a wonderful slideshow of Vova through the decades with a heart-ripping A Capella song as the soundtrack.  It’s by a Ukrainian group called Pikkardiyska Tertsia (translates to Picardy Third, a type of musical chord).  Using this song was insurance that anyone who saw it would cry their eyes out.  I’m moved every time I hear it and the climax just kills me – doesn’t matter that I’ve no idea what they’re singing.

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If my fancy new audio player plugin isn’t showing in your browser (I had to download the newest version of Firefox) here’s a link to the song.

As for running, I had a banner month, reached a new mileage high with 285 and today’s LR finished off a 71 mile week, so things are looking good.  ITBS, I scoff at you (though not too hard in case you come back).

Hudson had a 4-mile time trial listed for Friday, but if there’s one running phrase that makes me stick my fingers in my ears and go LALALALALALALA to drown out the thought, it’d be Time Trial.  I simply don’t do them and I’m at peace with that decision.   Something about running as hard as I can, alone, is comparable to sticking bamboo shoots up fingernails, so it ain’t ever gonna happen.

In its place, I’d planned a 4-mile tempo run, but it was so hot on Friday (dewpoint of 74, Heat Index 87) that I bagged it.  I did want to get something LTish in this week though, so I did a steady-stateish/tempoish progression yesterday before the funeral, middle 4 went 7:15, 7:05, 7:04, 7:00.  7 miles total at 7:45.

Then today, I’d planned 15 and went 16, albeit a slow 16 on Forbidden Drive (local trail) with some rain off and on.  Yesterday I was in high heels all day and had more than my share of wine, so I had no inclination to be anything but a turtle today.  It was so gorgeous with a dark sky (I love ominous-looking rainy days) and all that green on the trail that it turned out to be a slice of heaven.  Ended up with an 8:50 avg.

I’ll leave you with my month in review.  The grey text means it was in the plan but I didn’t do it.  The numbers on the far left are the weeks counting down to the marathon, so week 16 starts tomorrow.  Woohoo!

Life is looking up – I had a great night of sleep.  The noisy cardinal disappeared almost a week ago (maybe a neighbor took a BB gun to it) but instead of peace and quiet returning, the house next door is in the midst of a complete renovation, so yesterday I was out on my deck at 7:30 am, yelling at the workers for using a nail gun so early in the !@#$ morning.  I scared the guys pretty good, crazy bed-hair and all, so they stopped for about an hour and this morning they waited till a more reasonable 8am.

On the running front, things are going great.  The IT band is (dare I say it?) normal again, though I feel it’s one of those injuries that once you have it, you’re always open to reinjury, so I take it with a grain of salt.  It ended up lasting 6 weeks exactly, but now that I know what to do about it if it returns, I don’t foresee it being so drawn-out again.

Last week was a nice, fat, undramatic 61 mile week and boy, did that make me happy.  Pacing was slower than usual because it kept being mid-80s by the time I got out and with all that had been going on, I was satisfied to plod through most of them, so my runs averaged 8:51 to 8:08, depending on the day.

Continuing the trend, yesterday was a 7-mile recoveryish run at 8:53 (87 degrees) and today’s 9 averaged 8:24.  I’m just running by feel – haven’t worn my HR monitor in weeks, either.

Here’s what my tentative calendar looks like for the rest of the month.  I’ll probably get a day off in there somewhere, just not sure when.

Except for progression runs starting the 19th, I haven’t marked any quality runs in yet, choosing  to play it by ear since I’m not training yet.  I figure I’ll start with a short tempo this week, then alternate intervals and tempos till August.  I’m still feeling very much in “taking it easy” mode after being in running rehab the last few weeks.  Funny how easy it is to get out of the quality work habit once you’ve let it lapse.

One interesting note is that if I started Hudson at the 20-week mark (instead of doing my own base-building this month), marathon training would have begun this week.  As it is, I have no interest in calling anything “marathon training” 20-weeks out, so I’m ignoring the little numbers to the left of the calendar until August.  Nod to Hudson for the progression runs, though.

Besides that, I’ve been quite industrious these last few days, adding 10 new designs to The Gifted Runner, so check it out if you’re curious.  But ladies, don’t ask me why the pink wicking shirts are showing up as white, I’ve got a tech support email out to Zazzle to fix it.  It’s not my fault, I swear.