Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Realist's Training Plan

I told my Sunday morning class about some up coming races and invited them to join me for the Historic Half Marathon. In anticipation of hopefully a few of them joining me (because my class is the most awesome ever), here is the training schedule that I am personally following.

If you are interested in completing a half marathon in mid-May, then I suggest looking for an ambitious training schedule that starts out a little slow to build up endurance, then does a pretty heavy back end.  I also recommend checking out this website.

I used Jeff Galloway's training program for my marathon and had great results.  He;'s wonderful for beginner runners (as well as advanced) and has a lot of great tips in his book and that website mentioned above.

If you are training for the Historic Half...Since the race is less than 19 weeks away, I would suggest taking out some of the recovery weeks.

But if you're interested in my training program, here is what I've got coming up for me:



This schedule, of course, does not include my cross training and does allow for some fudge room.  I suggest on a rigorous training schedule like this to incorporate foam rolling at least once a week along with at least 1 yoga class (my hips have never felt so good as they did this morning during yoga).  I also encourage, if you're going for a time, to do considerable strength training.  A sample week with this type of added cross training may look like this:

Monday: Strength training (lower body and core)
Tuesday: Scheduled run
Wednesday: Yoga
Thursday: Scheduled run
Friday: Foam rolling, half hour of walking, cycling, elliptical, swimming (anything low impact or no impact) and/or upper body strength training
Saturday: Scheduled long run
Sunday: Recovery

Personally, I'm swapping Sunday with Friday because Fridays are my "clean the apartment" day.

You can find another training schedule, Here at my friend's Running for the Carbs blog.  She's running the half with me, so you can see how our training schedules work out.  I strongly suggest following her blog!

Have a great start to the week.  Let me know if you're training for a race!  I'm currently working on getting some guest bloggers in line to share their "first race" stories.  Would love to hear yours!

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