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Sunday, February 26, 2012

A New Plan

This running thing definitely keeps me busy and thinking. The past 2 weeks (maybe longer I tend to be obsessive about these things and lose track of time) I've been working on a new plan. I read a lot and as you may imagine some of that is about running. As with anything else I take in all the 'advice' and keep what makes sense to me and put the rest aside. Some I throw out but most I keep tucked away on the chance that it just doesn't make sense in my current mindset but might later on. But I'm digressing... surprise surprise.

I've started on a plan of tracking weekly mileage. I know that I must do the long runs if I'm going to survive the races I've entered but there are weeks when the long run is tricky because of my schedule. So I've opted for tracking weekly mileage and with some advance planning I can make up for lack of long run by adding the missed miles to my weekday runs. I'm also back to taking Mon and Fri off from running and going back to running back to back Sat and Sun whenever possible.

I looked at what I had been doing recently and settled on 25 miles to start. I also switched my view of the week. I was used to putting Sat and Sun at the beginning (ala Phillyfit) but switched that. This works better with my way of thinking which is that the week starts on Monday.

So this week, which began Feb 20 looked like this:

5, 3, 5, 0, 0, 8, 3.5 = 24.5

I only managed 3.5 and ran on Monday anyway because a) it was a holiday and b) I had been slacking prior to this. I'm working in 4 week cycles so the next three look like this:

0, 2, 4, 2, 0, 11, 6 = 25 (same total as week 1)
0, 2, 4, 2, 0, 13, 6 = 27 (10% increase over weeks 1 and 2)
0, 3, 7, 3, 0, 0, 0 = 13  (Half of week 3, and the weekend off)
The next 4 week cycle will start with week 3's total for two weeks then increase by 10% followed by 1/2 again. And so on. Stay tuned.

Ultimately I'd like to keep my long run mileage up and going up. Instead of "starting over" after every race. My goal race in 2012 is the Philly Half. I have other races planned but I'm going to treat them as training runs and keep up my mileage for those weeks. Somewhere I plan to work in a week off from running. Probably every 3 months. I'll talk about that more later when I have it figured out.
Today's run was 3.5 miles on the Rocky Run trail in Middletown Twp by the Wawa dairy. My ankle didn't like it, but I did! :)

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