After beginning my marathon training on Monday 2nd January, with a 3 mile run at quite a slow pace, I followed this up with football on Monday evening...one or the other has caused my legs to feel rather fatigued today, and I am quite glad that I have a day off training today.
Running that is...it will be time for the gym tonight after work for some upper body weights work, as well as a relaxing sauna session to hopefully sooth the muscles in time for my run tomorrow.
My marathon training plan loosely follows the principles of the Hanson brothers, and also combines this with the thinking of North Belfast Harriers' Darryl Blair. The major differences in the two plans is the consitency of Darryls, against the slow buildup, and added speedwork in the Hanson brothers plan. I plan to merge the two, with a slow buildup for the first 4-6 weeks, to aid me in returning to some sort of fitness, along with the reduced speedwork as advised by Darryl. I then plan to consistently hit the times set out in Darryls plan in terms of time spent running per day, and hopefully this will fall quite closely in line with the Hanson plan that I began looking at.
One thing that both plans seem to be based on, is slightly higher than average weekly mileage, with the long run at weekends being shortened slightly, over other marathon training plans.
For example, in previous years, by week 12, I would have run 18+ miles at least twice, with one being 20-22 miles long. This always seemed to take a bit more out of me than I had, and I always failed to finish these runs strongly. The current plan, bases the long runs at no more than 16 miles, to ensure that it is a lower percentage of total weekly mileage. The run the day before makes it a long run, on tired legs. For example, the longest run is 16 miles, which follows a steady 10 miles the day before. Therefore, 26 miles is covered over two days, rather than during one effort.
I am hoping this approach will enable me to avoid injuries and perform stronger than in previous years, including a possible negative split race (second half faster than the first half).
So according to the Belfast City Marathon website, only another 124 days to go...
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