I was checking out the calendar and this is the week I am to start training for a marathon in October. I was planning on using the program Jeff Galloway has in his book. I am running just to finish but I am trying to figure out how to work in the long run. Right now I have Monday as my rest day (light weight lifting), Tues. is swim, Wed is bike, Thurs is run, Fri. is swim, Sat is bike, Sun is run. Of course as I get closer to the tris I start my bricks (usually 4 weeks out) which is usually on Sun and they are bike/run. In 5 weeks I have my next tri and by that week I should be up to 7 miles on my long run. 4 weeks later I have another tri and I should be up to 11 or 12 then 4 weeks after that I have my last tri for the season and I'll be running around 17-18 on my long run. I'm wondering would I be sacrificing a lot if I took my Thurs. run and made that the long run with the swim the next day as my active recovery day? Galloway's suggested schedule for just finishing a marathon is cross training three days a week with running three days (two of the days are run 30-45 minutes and the other is the long run) and one day off. Is it going to hurt me if I don't have all the running time suggested for the next few months?
If your goal is a marathon,
If your goal is a marathon, 2 days of running a weeks seems like it might be insufficient. I'd say getting that third day in is pretty important if you want to be able to enjoy your marathon. The plan is already very limited in running with all that cross training.
a pattern that has worked
a pattern that has worked for me in going from 6 workouts/wk to 9 workouts/wk is to always swim on run days. for me, i would swim at 5am, and run at lunchtime at work
M: off
T: bike
W: swim, run
Th: bike
F: swim, run
Sa: long bike (or brick)
Su: swim, long run
if you wanted to get 4 runs a wk, add a run to the first bike day after the rest day.
Excellent, thank you!
Excellent, thank you!
just did my first marathon
just did my first marathon in April after only having 10 weeks to prepare. I used the rookiemarathon.com plan which was 4 days of running per week with long efforts on the weekend. Weekday runs are not longer than 8 miles so it is easy to fit into a busy schedule. It being mostly winter months I backed off on the cross training but could see it fitting in to the schedule nicely.