10 Day Cycle – Training Plan
The month of February continues to march forward and my spring training plan continues to unfold. When I started planning for the spring of '12, I laid out a plan based on a 7 day cycle. However, as I have gotten older, the 7 day cycle just didn't seem to be doing the trick. A couple of years ago when I was heading into the Twin Cities Marathon and on some good advice from Mark Hadley, I tried a 9 day training cycle. The training leading up to Twin Cities wasn't awe inspiring but on race day all of those workouts bared their fruit and I nearly broke 2:40. I was just a couple of seconds shy of doing it.
Thus, I went back to the drawing board and updated my training plan to use a 10 day cycling. I am a couple of years older and the extra recovery day makes even more sense now. My game plan was to alternate up tempo workouts with long study runs. Another way to think about it is I run a long run roughly every 6 days and I run up tempo run every 6 days. One could also look at my plan and see that I do a stressor workout every 3rd day, but by keeping LR situated in the middle, this allows me to stay well on the aerobic side of the training. The remaining days are broken up into either 10 or 7 mile runs. If I do a long run, I will do 10 miles the next day. If I do a tempo run, I will typically follow it up with a couple of easy 7 mile runs.
Today, I finish my first 10 day cycle and I am happy to report that the training is coming along nicely. Two long runs and a tempo run have been completed. No one run was super fantastic but neither were there any really bad runs. Most runs were right in the middle of where I thought I should be at this point.
Tomorrow begins the next 10 day training cycle and it starts on a tough note. I will be running 2 x 2 miles. Look for a report on this workout over the weekend or early next week.
Sharing one thought at time,
The Cool Down Runner
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