2015 Training

If you've followed this blog before, you know I'm a huge nerd, and a couple of things I enjoy doing are reading books about running and writing training plans. After a somewhat disappointing 2014 running season, I've mapped out my 2015 season. I've already set some big goals, and this year I'm going to try hard to make it happen.

It's one thing to set goals, it's another things to be dedicated enough and well-planned enough to make them happen. My mom was fond of saying, "Fail to plan, plan to fail." So, in my mother's spirit, and with all my running nerdiness, I've planned out my training from now until the Whistlestop Marathon in October.

The first race I'm planning on is a 7 mile race at the end of March. My time at that race will let me know how much work I have ahead of me before my next race--probably a 5k in May. In between I'll also be pacing a couple of marathons and a few half marathons.

I used "Run Faster from the 5k to the Marathon" by Brad Hudson and Matt Fitzgerald to set up my training plan for the 5k. After spending the past six weeks doing mostly easy runs, this was my first week officially on the training plan. I've had good success using a Hudson plan for two of my marathons, so we'll see how the 5k plan goes.

Following the 5k, I'll take about a week off before jumping into a marathon training plan. This time I'm going to try something different and try out training using "The Hansons Marathon Method" by Luke Humphrey and Keith Hanson. The advanced training plan in the book calls for fewer miles than the training plan from "Run Faster from the 5k to the Marathon" that I used for my PR marathon back in 2012, and the elite plan in the book had a quite a bit more miles than I can handle or have time for.

Fortunately, the book also gave advice on how to add mileage to the advanced program. Using that advice and looking at the author's training log for the 15 weeks before his PR marathon, I put together a training plan for Whistlestop.

So far my training has been going pretty well. In my six weeks leading up to the Hudson training plan, I've averaged over 50 miles a week, and made it 225 miles in January--the most I've ran in a month since October of 2013.

Now I'm just hoping to stay healthy and be able to keep increasing my miles.

Happy Running!