Having had an autumn hiatus from road racing due to the birth of my little girl I returned to road racing earlier this month with a ten mile PB of 65:50 at the Stockport 10. After a good couple of months training I was feeling really good and raring to have another crack at the marathon.
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| Rejected. Again. |
Runners love a target so what's my target for this time? I entered the ballot for the London Marathon and was rejected again. I'm not sure I really want to do London but I'd like to have the option. So it looks like the only way I'd be able to do that is to run a good for age time. For my age group (18-39) the GFA time is 3:05 which is my target for this year.
Over seven minutes improvement is a big ask so there is going to be a lot of hard work to be done, I've been reading the excellent Advanced Marathoning that advocates more long running in addition to distance tempo running at half-marathon pace with less intervals. There are also some brutal looking long runs with chunks at marathon pace. The reviews and comments I've read about this book say it works for people who have done a couple of marathons and want to improve. That's me.
There are several schedules to choose from and I have selected the 18 week 70 mile plan. Don't worry though I'm only using it as a guide!
I'm not going to go into every session in detail, you can see all these on my Strava account I'll just give a summary of each week:
Week 1 (18 weeks to go)
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 14k (6k @ HM pace 4:10m/km)
Wednesday: 17k medium run to work & 7.6k run home (total 24.9k)
Thursday: 7.6k recovery run.
Friday: Rest
Saturday: Oldham parkrun + run to and from (total 16.2k)
Sunday: Long run 22.7k
Total: 85.4k (53m)
There are not normally 2 rest days a week but I was planning on racing the South East Lancs XC on Saturday afternoon but being full of a cold I decided I was fit to train but not race.
Week two includes Christmas day and Boxing day but there will be no lot up on the training.
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