It doesn’t seem long ago that I received the fantastic news that I’d been awarded the sole London Marathon “Club Place” we get at Running for Time. And yet here we are, Christmas Week, running the first week of my usual 18 week training schedule – an adapted version of the “Pfitzinger and Douglas Advanced Marathoning 18 week/Up to 55mile per week” schedule.
Despite the grand plans to “pre-train” I made in my previous post, this didn’t quite go according to plan. I ended up participating in our local cross-country league for 3 of the 4 fixtures, which I performed well in – certainly better than I expected to!
I also ran the “Full Monty“, a local, brutal 10m XC race with massive un-runnable hills which I again did better at than I thought I would
So this, along with a couple of speedy attempts at parkrun, meant most of my quality mileage was in Races, though I was able to put in some great track sessions which has clearly helped my speed my speed a lot.
My ultimate pre-training target was for a Sub-19:30 parkrun and to lose some weight. I had hoped for sub-20 at Swindon parkrun in mid-November as a “stepping stone” but only managed 20:21. Then at Newbury last week I ran a 19:47 in spite of the fact I’ve actually gained a bit of weight.
What this shows me is that the training is working and if I had lost the weight I’d probably have hit that arbitrary goal – 30 seconds off my 5k time shows I am moving in the right direction. Given we’ve had birthdays and Christmas its unsurprising I’ve not been able to lose weight really. I’m still confident of my marathon goal of sub 3:05 though, as its usually in the new year when my mileage climbs that I am able to really focus on calorie control.
What the Newbury time trial has enabled me to do is reset my training paces to something more recent and relevant. Cracking out the trusty McMillan Calculator I plugged the numbers in and came back with these.
vLT (Lactate Threshold): 6:49 – So this is the sort of pace I’ll be running my Tempo runs at – hopefully, just under.
Long Runs: 7:30 – 8:46 – I’ve been trying to keep my long runs at s sub-8 pace in the build up, which falls in line with this range. The reason being is that I seem to run more economically at that pace and feel it will better prepare me come race day. So my target pace is 7:59
Easy Runs: 7:26 – 8:27 – I roughly translate this as my “General Aerobic” pace in the book. Again, in pre-training I’ve been trying to run at 7:30-7:45 so that will be my target range.
Recovery Runs: 8:32 – 9:13 – Yep, hopefully the slower end of this pace to give myself optimum chace to repair any damage I do!
So, I’m injury-free, my training plan is ready, I have my training paces. I’m ready to go! So here’s week 1’s planned schedule.
| Day | Book Plan | My Plan | Notes |
| Monday | Rest | Rest | |
| Tuesday | 8m (4m Threshold) | 8m (4m Threshold) | |
| Wednesday | Rest | 4m Recovery | I like to run 5 times a week |
| Thursday | 9m General Aerobic | 9m General Aerobic | |
| Friday | Rest | 14m Medium-Long | Christmas day on Sunday! Not doing a 14 miler then! |
| Saturday | 4m Recovery | 3m Recovery | Standard parkrun day |
| Sunday | 12m Medium-Long | 3m Recovery | Bonus Christmas Day parkrun |
So this is 8 miles more than the book would have me run, however the overall weekly mileage is within 10% of an increase over the previous week, and my long runs are already ahead of plan so I should finish this week reasonably comfortably.
Time to get training!
