The Official Training Begins!
This past Tuesday was the first start of the Running Room marathon clinic I signed up for. You may be wondering why, after running so many marathons, and having taught the clinic twice before, did I feel the need to sign up for it. Well, I have a few reasons:
- Wanted to find a new group of people to run/train with.
- Figured that officially signing up for a clinic with $$ would make me more committed to getting out during the week.
- The Running Room program has worked for me in the past, and it may work again.
The group is pretty good; a nice spread of people of various skill levels. Most have run at least one marathon before. Many are either coming off injuries, or trying to get back after a lay-off (like me). The instructor is an old running buddy of mine, who actually was a student in the first marathon clinic I taught. There are a few others who I have either taught or run with in the clinic; having familiar faces there is nice.
The training schedule for a 3:45 marathon is pretty aggressive. It calls for running 6 days a week, with Monday being the lone rest day. It’s an 18-week training program, that looks like this:
- Monday - rest day
- Tuesday - 6km tempo
- Wednesday - 10km tempo or hills or speed
- Thursday - 8km steady
- Friday - 10km steady
- Saturday - 6km steady
- Sunday - long slow distance run, ranging from 10km to 32km
You can see my first two workouts here:
Today’s scheduled run calls for an 8km steady run, but I think I’ll do some cross-training today instead; give my legs a bit of a break.
