The Plan

The California International Marathon (CIM) is 18 weeks from today in Sacramento. Assuming I am not sidelined by injury the plan is train hard for that and run a sub 3 (hopefully somewhere in the mid 2:50s).

I have chosen to follow a plan from Daniels - somewhat optimistically called the "Elite" plan. I am no elite, and I'm pretty sure an elite wouldn't be training the way that I train (certainly they wouldn't be training at the speeds I train), but Daniels has a bunch of conversions for people that are running marathons slower than 2:10. One weird thing is that it ends up based on time, not mileage, which is new to me.

You really need to be running comfortably near the peak mileage for a month or so before you start, which fits well with the July I just ran. First 6 weeks are all lower mileage (70-90% peak) so you can absorb the impact of adding in the quality workouts. I'm running this first phase with a set of paces based on a 3:01:39 marathon, 1:27:04 half (VDOT 53)- After 6 weeks I'll run a race/time trial to see if I should adjust these for teh next 6 weeks(hopefully faster, not slower) - there's another checkpoint at 12 weeks.

Basic plan is 2 quality workouts a week, Q1 and Q2. Q1 is Sunday, and is a long run incorporating a lot of marathon pace and also tempo pace. Q2 is midweek and is faster stuff, with a lot of mile repeats, 1,000s, 400s and also plenty of tempo pace. He likes to have multiple paces within each run which should be interesting (assuming it doesn't kill me). Throw in some strides 2 days before Q1 and 1 day after, and the rest is just easy 8:00 miles, with enough doubles to make up the total for the week.

I set my peak at 110 miles and kicked it off today (weeks start Sunday). It's an 80% week, so 88 is the plan. Today was my first Q1 - this was the planned workout:
- warmup - 12 minutes easy (8:09)
- 30 minutes at marathon pace (6:56)
- 5 minutes at tempo pace (6:32)
- 25 minutes at marathon pace
- 5 minutes at tempo
- 5 minutes at marathon pace
- cooldown - 12 minutes easy.
total would be just over 13 miles, but I planned to spend a little longer in the warmup/cooldown to get the total up to 16-17.

After a 25 minute warmup I kicked off the first MP session and ran for 30 minutes at exactly 6:56. Felt OK. First tempo session was at 6:31 pace, and was OK, but noticeably harder effort than MP. Dropping back to MP was difficult, I couldn't get on steady pace and kept going too fast, eventually got it together and ran the 25 mins at 6:54. Next tempo was a hard transition (was slightly uphill too) but held on for 6:30. Final 5 minutes at MP was OK but again I struggled with pace and it ended up fast at 6:47. Ran 4 miles cooldown for a 16.75m total. An interesting workout, certainly very different than just running at a constant pace. I think the transitions in/out of MP will be good once I get a little better at them.

I like overall the structure of the plan, with just 2 quality workouts/week and then a lot of flexibility on where the other miles fit. The mix of paces will probably help, since I know that all out track sessions like 20x400m are going to kill me. Hopefully the changing pace will be a little easier on me. Guess I'll find out.

So the plan is set: 166 runs, 1,572 miles, 18 weeks with 1 run and 16.75 miles done.