Saturday, March 8, 2008

Training plans

As it seems to be going better again, I think I must think of how fast I want to be going and then keep it there if possible. The problem is that there are two aims that I have in mind, going a little faster and going a lot further. The question is how to do both?

While running yesterday I think I came up with a plan. At the moment I can comfortably complete 4, 5, 6 and at a push even 10km. Problem is that my ultimate goal, to complete the Two Oceans Half Marathon, means that I need to be able to run at a pace faster than 8.5km for the entire race. At the moment I'm quite close to that, so I think I need to speed up a bit. I would be more comfortable at a pace of about 7min/km. That should have me finishing in about 2hrs 15, with a lot of time left till the three hour cuttoff. Question is how to get there and maintian it for greater distances.

What I'm going to do is stick to my "style" of running, where I run and walk. At the moment my walking time is 1min and my running time is 30s. This allows an average pace of around 8min/km, which in itself will be fast enough to allow me to complete the race in time, but I don't want to cut it too fine. Then at a certain training distance, 5/6km at the moment I will keep the walking time the same and slowly increase my running time till I reach the 7min/km mark. Only once I can comfortably run that distance at 7min/km will I start training to go another km.

It's pretty simple, but it makes sense to me and should allow me to progress without hurting myself. I will try to keep doing a monthly 10km race aswell to keep track of my progress. Once I can run a 10km in under 70 minutes then I will start looking to run slightly longer distances. A great suggestion from one of the Run Walk For Life coaches was that in a race if you can find 2 km markers you can run from one back to the previous one, and then continue running, this immediately adds 2km to your race distance, which is a great way to start moving towards the final goal of 21.1km.

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