I'm 4 weeks into my revised training schedule and things have gone very well so far. The chest infection of December 2009 is a dim and distant memory and I'm working very hard to get to a level that will bring success in the USA next year.
The new training schedule took a few weeks to compile and was drawn up with all of the lessons I learned last year in mind. There is a heavy focus on running high mileage on consecutive days. The ultimate aim in this phase of training is to recreate one of the weeks in the USA. I'm scheduled to achieve that by mid August. That's 7 days of 32 miles a day to be exact.
Being able to run that kind of consecutive daily mileage doesn't happen overnight and the build up to that really starts this week. Today, I ran the Peter's Pies 6 Tyne Bridges Challenge to give me 10.5 miles. I'll be running 10 miles a day for the next 6 days to give 7 consecutive days of at least 10 miles a day. Training for the the 3 weeks following that is varied and will see me in the gym as well as getting some hills in and some speed work too.
In 4 weeks time I will be doing another 7 consecutive days of running. This time the daily mileage will be 13 miles. That will be followed by 3 varied weeks and on the 4th week it will be another 7 consecutive days of running. And so on and so forth. The key to this schedule is the big consecutive mileage every 4th week. I'm calling them my "red weeks" as that's what colour they are highlighted in on my spreadsheet.
In theory, I should be doing less hours at work on a red week. I will also be doing very few school runs on a red week. The other varied weeks, which are green and yellow incidentally, are also designed for consecutive mileage but over fewer days. These weeks are still tough but I should have more time for family, work etc.
There are over 2000 miles to be ran between now and mid August! This is how those Red weeks pan out:
In theory, I should be doing less hours at work on a red week. I will also be doing very few school runs on a red week. The other varied weeks, which are green and yellow incidentally, are also designed for consecutive mileage but over fewer days. These weeks are still tough but I should have more time for family, work etc.
There are over 2000 miles to be ran between now and mid August! This is how those Red weeks pan out:
07/02/10 - 7 days of 10 miles a day.
07/03/10 - 7 days of 13 miles a day.
04/04/10 - 7 days of 16 miles a day.
02/05/10 - 7 days of 19 miles a day.
30/05/10 - 7 days of 22 miles a day.
27/06/10 - 7 days of 25 miles a day.
25/07/10 - 7 days of 28 miles a day.
22/08/10 - 7 days of 32 miles a day.
I'm currently on the 2nd day of a red week and feeling very good. My confidence has increased considerably over the last 4 weeks and it's a great start to 2010.
