I don’t often post the details of my training cycles. Pay no attention to the man behind the spreadsheet.
My training plans always start with my Saturday long runs. During the past several years, I’ve scheduled my last 20 miler two weeks out from race day. I then work backward with available weeks to see how many to add to my schedule. I can’t do long runs every weekend (well, I could, but I don’t want to) so I added in a couple breaks. The choice was 3 straight weekends of long runs twice for six total or have two breaks and five total twenty milers. Those of you following me this winter probably aren’t too surprised I went with fewer long runs.
My next decision was how to beef up my overall mileage. I like to have 2 rest days each week so I went with adding 3 miles to my normal 8 miler. This isn’t a big deal on the weekends, however requires me to get up at 4:30am during the week. You wouldn’t think that extra 30 minutes would be too bad, but it’s a struggle at times. And here I am in week 5. I didn’t realize until Monday what awaited me this week. Sigh.
The other thing you’ll notice is all the walking I do. I’ve got 25 miles per week on the schedule, however I should end up over 30 miles most weeks. I have no idea if this is really beneficial from a training standpoint (my guess is no), however it’s something that I enjoy so it’s something that I do.
Some of you may be wondering what type of workouts are included in all that running mileage in the table above. Bwahahaha. Workouts. You guys crack me up. All of my runs are at whatever chill pace I feel like executing on any given day. While I don’t walk every single hill on my runs, I do walk most of them. Is this beneficial for my training? Probably not, but it’s what I want to do and it helps me get in all those miles so it’s what I do.
This may not be a perfect training plan, but it’s good enough for me.