New Training Plans

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I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my training plan since my race on Sunday.  I want to get my training base back up now that I feel like I’ve got my plantar fascia pain in a good place.  And by good place, I mean that I had almost no pain at all after finishing my half!

I am still having pain in my quads, but I’m taking an easy week and spending a lot of time rolling that muscle group, from my adductors to my IT bands.  I’ll try a run this weekend and see how that goes.  If all goes well, I’ll move into the first phase of my May Training Plan.

I’m starting out with just two weeks right now because I want to judge my progress and see how I’m feeling before I start making plans too far ahead. My highest mileage as I trained for my half was 21 miles. This is pretty low mileage for me typically, but I knew going into this half that I wasn’t as trained as I have been for others, primarily due to my injury recovery.  I just wanted to get through the race without hurting myself.  And I did! Under normal circumstances, I might have skipped the race, but Flying Pirate is special because it’s inaugural year was my first half and I have run it every year since.

So, I’m starting slow.  I’m going to start with 3-4 runs each week, with a total weekly mileage under 20 miles.  I’m going to assess my progress every two weeks and build in a recovery week after building for 4 weeks (as long as I stay healthy and feel good). My hope is that by the end of the summer I’ll be back to running 30-35 miles per week spread out over 4-5 runs.

Right now, I’m not spending much energy focusing on pace because I just want to build up that base mileage.  I use the Galloway method for almost all of my runs, so I’ll continue with that and add time to my run intervals as I feel comfortable doing so. I’m really careful about this, because it is the best method I have found for keeping my asthma in check. However, I really want to be able to run at least a 5K without stopping for a walk break again, so every few weeks, I’ll add in a 3.1 run that I’ll call an endurance run.  For those runs, I won’t use my timer. Instead, I’ll run at an easy pace until my body tells me I need to walk.  Then, I’ll take a one minute walk break before I start running again.  I’ll follow that cycle until I finish the entire mileage.  My goal will be to decrease the total walking time and increase the total running time during each of those runs.

I’m really looking forward to kicking off this new training plan.  In fact, I’m so excited about tracking my training that I’ve added a new tab to my blog just to keep up with my training plan. I’ll update it along the way, so you can help me track my progress!