There are several brave souls in my program who are running the Boston Marathon through a charity associated with our hospital. These guys agree to raise a certain amount of money in honor of a child currently undergoing treatment for cancer. I was very happy to be able to donate to their causes both because I remember the difficulty of marathon training and because I happen to personally know each of their patient partners. Of course, hearing about this program has made me start thinking about running Boston again…
Sadly, my current level of training is woefully inadequate. I’ve just started regularly running 10-12 miles/week again. Amazing to think I could once easily run 10-12 miles in a day. So, my current plan is to gradually increase my base training to 20 miles/week and then start training for the (insert dramatic music here) Third Annual Phedippidations Half Marathon Challenge on the weekend of October 11th and 12th. I ran this race (in the form of the BAA Half Marathon) in 2006, and this was the spring board that allowed me to run Boston in 2007. I would follow essentially the same training program, but perhaps focus a little more on speedwork.
Back to the details. I’ve based pretty much all of my previous training plans off the Bob Glover books. I might look around on the web to see if other things would work better for me this time. Thanks to the awesome podcaster Steve Runner, I recently heard about the training log Buckeyeoutdoors.com which sounds awesome. Not only can you keep track of your running, but you can also find training programs and teams to train with and a whole host of other cool features. Sadly, I can’t figure out how to import my old running data. I’m sure it’s possible so please let me know if you’ve figured it out!
Most half marathon training programs are 12 weeks long, so I’ll give myself 16 weeks (time to miss a few long runs and time to get injured). If I’m going to run a half marathon on the weekend of October 11th and 12, that means I need to start my training the week of June 23rd. That means that I have 13 weeks to build a better base. Isn’t this thought process fascinating??
Here’s my current training plan, based on running 4-5 days per week depending on my schedule at work. I’ve written it to be 12 weeks long so that I can easily miss a week due to injury. While I’m building my base, I probably won’t do any speedwork.
Week 1 (this week): 3, 2, 3, 2 –> 10
Week 2: 3, 3, 2, 4 –> 12
Week 3: 3, 4, 3, 4 –> 14
Week 4: 3, 3, 2, 4 –> 12
Week 5: 3, 3, 2, 2, 5 –> 15
Week 6: 3, 4, 3, 5 –> 15
Week 7: 3, 3, 2, 3, 6 –> 17
Week 8: 3, 3, 4, 3, 5 –> 18
Week 9: 3, 4, 3, 5 –> 15
Week 10: 3, 4, 4, 3, 6 –> 20
Week 11: 4, 4, 4, 3, 7 –> 22
Week 12: 3, 4, 4, 3, 6 –> 20
Okay enough with boring details. That’s my current plan, we’ll see how it goes. There’s plenty of room to improvise. Hopefully I can figure out how to use buckeyeoutdoors and then I can automically have my training posted in a sidebar on this website. Cool.
