Thursday, January 22, 2009

Mileage looming

I found a training schedule that I will use as a guideline for my own half-marathon training. It's from the book The Competitive Runner's Handbook by Bob Glover, which I recently picked up. It's a great book as it explains a lot of different aspects of running (and will provide plenty of fodder for this blog!).

It's 12 weeks and that would start Monday, as my run is on April 19, the end of the 12th week.

The parts I will modify are the Wednesday training sessions. He includes fartlek runs, tempo runs, hills... and I will do those but I will also do intervals and I will adjust things accordingly. The part I won't deviate too much from is the distance runs. It calls for runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well as long runs on Saturdays. The midweek runs are shorter.

Here are the Tuesday distances in succession: 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3.

Thursday runs in succession: 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 4, 5, 4, 4, 4, 2.

Saturday runs in succession: 6, 8, 10, 12, off (10 on Sunday), 13, 13, 2 (6 on Sunday), 13, off (8 on Sunday), 10, 8, off (Sunday Race Day!).

As for the total weekly mileage... 16, 18, 20, 24, 27, 30, 30, 26, 30, 26, 25, 23, 11 + race.

That's a lot of miles and I hope to do the majority outdoors.

Yes, it's daunting but I'm looking forward to it and hopefully I'll embrace it soon enough.

3 comments:

c said...

Wow! More power to ya! My friends are trying to convince me to do a road race this spring, but since a vast majority of my miles have been logged at the gym, I am hesitating. I don't LOVE running, it really more for fitness, so I am sort of hemming and hawing. Good inspiration!

thrasherswife said...

You go, LB. You'll do fine, I'm telling ya you could run a race tomorrow if you wanted, it's got a lot to do with the mental attitude, not just the physical. Just make sure your playlist is good and inspiring the whole way through. When I raced in the OC 1/2 I got really bored at mile 10, not tired at all, just bored of running. Luckily they had a live band right then and the live music pumped me up a bit... You'll do great, and you'll enjoy all your training runs knowing you have a goal. And I'll be jealous you've logged in all the weekly miles, I'll have to start competing my list against yours :) If I can only get life to cooperate so I can get back to running everyday!

L.B. said...

Who am I, you should go for it! Of course, easy for me to say... but we could draw inspiration from each other.

TW, thanks. It's encouraging to hear an experienced runner such as yourself telling me that I can accomplish such a challenging feat. That's the sort of praise I can bottle up and use during a longer run.