San Antonio Rose

Deep within my heart lies a melody
A song of old San Antone.

Though actually it's more rock and roll than country, because today saw the start of my training plan for November's San Antonio Rock & Roll marathon.  It is my goal race for this year, and my lofty aim is to try and run a sub-3 hour marathon - that equates to roughly a 6:50 average pace.  A pipe dream perhaps, but if you're going to set a goal you may as well aim high. The plan I designed is partly based on the concepts I learned at the RRCA coaching class, and partly on things I know to have worked for me in the past.  It is a 23 week schedule, split into three phases - 13 weeks of base building, 7 weeks of sharpening and 3 weeks of tapering that takes me up to race day.

I have given myself a specific pace range for every run from now until November.  This morning my schedule dictated 12 miles at an 8:30 to 9:00 pace, and I averaged 8:33.  In the base building phase, we concentrate mostly on building mileage, and don't really worry about the pace - that comes in the sharpening phase (though I simply refuse to slow down to the extent that the RRCA recommends and have cheated on my pace ranges accordingly).  The plan calls for me to run 6 days a week (Fridays are rest days), with long run progressions on Saturday and alternating short to medium distance runs midweek at varying paces (I hit the short 4 mile runs harder than the longer ones).  I will add in cross training (yoga, weights, core and the bike trainer) on hard run days as I see fit.

I put a similar plan together for Clea (my regular running buddy), who is also running San Antonio and shooting for a 3:20.  Again I cheated and made all of our weekend runs the same distance and pace (it's so much easier to do those 20+ milers when you have somebody to run with), and left in our fun Sunday morning Danish runs (can I build treats from a bakery into a training plan?).


I'm in two minds about whether or not to publish my weekly training plan/log on the blog.  I did it for White Rock last year, and it worked pretty well for me.  What do you think - anyone interested in seeing how many runs I skip, or reading my sarcastic rants, moans and curses about Texas heat and humidity?