Star City 1/2 Training Schedule

     I usually train for a 1/2 marathon with a 10 week plan, but this year is shaping up differently with me doing a 1/2 marathon this fall instead of a full marathon. I had trained for the full Richmond Marathon with a 16 week plan starting in late July in years past, but here it is mid August and with the daughter heading back to school next week it seemed like a good time to get a little jump start and come up with a dedicated plan.

     So here is my 13 week plan aimed at targeting a peak performance at the Star City Half Marathon on Nov 17th. The biggest experiment here is me running 5 days per week instead of the 4 that I usually train with. The Sunday progressive run and the Tuesday recovery run will be very low intensity, so I don't anticipate any problems. If things should become "uncomfortable", I will drop the Sunday progressive and make the necessary adjustments.

     Saturdays will be flexible with most being a 20 mile bike ride followed by a break and then some lifting, but I also have a few races built in. I will be doing short distances on the bike on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday so if I can't get the Saturday long ride in then I'll just use it for rest or family time.

     

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Update 10-10-12

     I'm having to update my training schedule for the Star City Half Marathon because there have been changes to my work schedule and my recreational life. As for work, I have replaced Fri/Sat off with Tues/Wed, so I need to do my long runs on my day off. As for my recreational life...I have found that now that I have no triathlons on the calendar, that I am enjoying taking a break from cross training with the swim and bike. My original plan was partially dependent on cycling miles to induce fatigue prior to running my long and recovery runs. I'm just not motivated to invest the time on the bike right now, so I'm reworking the training schedule to reflect higher run mileage. With the "big" race still 5 weeks out, I'm confident I have time to adapt to the additional stresses that will be encountered with the higher mileage.

   Update 10-15-12

     I'm thinking I may have called it wrong on my last update 5 days ago. I've had some encouraging runs and some discouraging runs throughout this training cycle, and while I do like to see a plan through to the finish, I believe I can now safely call it that the 5 day a week running schedule simply does not work for me. I'm going to fall back to what I refer to as my default schedule, which is 3 runs per week consisting of a tempo, an interval, and a long. I'll still use the target mileage in the chart above, so I won't make a new chart and I'll substitute the races for other workouts.