I have made a plan for how to use this blog. I talked about it a little in my post last Friday, but basically I will post PhD Adventure blogs on Fridays, every week!, and Running blogs on Tuesdays, every week. I've got things organised and planned through, with an outline of how every blog should look like, so let's dive in. As today is Tuesday, here is my Running blog for the week.
I had very high goals for this year's running. I like to aim for the stars, so to speak. I want to run a marathon and figured it would be a great way to celebrate turning 40 by running 42.2 km in the Auckland Marathon in November. I also planned to run 2 halfmarathons, at least one 10K and twelve 5K park runs. Then things changed. Because of all the changes I made to my eating, I simply did not have the ability to train in January and most of February. I am back on track now, with 3-4 runs a week plus strength training so I needed to re-evaluate my goals.
First of all, I am forced to postpone my first marathon. I won't be anywhere near Auckland in November so that it just not an option. I am not going to be ready in August, for the Reykjavik marathon, and I won't be able to travel to any place in Europe in October/November, so my marathon ambition has been put on ice. There is always next year! I have not run a 5K yet this year. Hopefully I will be able to take part in my first park run at the end of March. We will see, I am not going to stress about it. The 10K is still on the table. Where and when, I have no idea. There is a 10K race close to my hometown in August, but the timing might not be suitable so I still don't know if I will be able to keep that goal. That leaves the half marathon. I have already signed up for the 21.1K distance in the Reykjavik marathon in late August. And I am still hoping I can find the money to go to Wellington for the first weekend of July to run the half marathon distance in the Wellington Marathon. At least I will run one half marathon this year. I really look forward to it.
I have basically created my own training plan. I have an overall idea of mileage and how to increase it slowly, but I only plan one week at a time in advance. There is no 12 week plan or 16 week plan or anything like that that I am following. I need to get better at listening to my body (mostly my knee!) and having a long term plan doesn't help me do that. I subscribed to emails from Runners Connect, just the free stuff, and it is fantastic. I would love to be able to get more personal assistance from them, one day maybe, but at the moment the free emails will have to do. There is so much good information, and a lot of it is new to me. They talk about training with a heart beat monitor, how to strength train properly as a runner, how to build mileage, what to eat (which I ignore as they are still using the traditional 'you have to eat carbs' method) and just a lot of good information. I have started using the heart rate method. I was doing that last year as well, but now I'm taking it to the next level. Taking it very seriously and not looking at my pace at all. And I am building my mileage very slowly. When it comes to how much I run (or will run as I am just starting up again), my thinking is that I will do 3 weeks of build up (15km, 16,5km, 18km/week) and then have an easy week (15km), and then build up again for another 3 weeks (18km, 20km, 22km/week), or something similar to that. I really need to keep my knee healthy. The plan is to do 4 types of runs. Day 1 is an interval (fartlek or pyramid) plus strength. During the intervals you go up to the anaerobic training zone, it is a VO2 max speed work. Day 2 is a tempo run in the lactate threshold zone, plus strength training. Day 3 is a recovery run, and day 4 is the long run in the aerobic training zone. Those weeks when I can only run 3 days, I will leave out either the interval run or the tempo run. The recovery run is very important so that one is always staying, as well as the long run.
My strength training consists of upper body workouts, lower body workouts and core work, the basics. I do the core work more or less every day that I run. I have such a week core. I can barely do 30sec of plank! That needs to change. I am also doing yoga. Just at home using YouTube, for example this video. I am working on my flexibility so this sessions is perfect for me. And it is not too long, so I can easily do it in the mornings before breakfast. The plan is to do yoga on days I don't run. Would love to create a good yoga habit and do it everyday. That is still a work in procress. So, this is my training schedule. Next week I will go into more detail about certain aspects of my training.
Keep calm and run like the wind :)
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