More about my training schedule

The longest/only race I have ever ran was a 5 miles road race. I finished in under an hour, but I did stop to stretch/rest briefly during the race. My goal with this marathon is to not have to stop. I will be running a 5K on February 13th with my fiance in celebration of Valentine's Day (the race starts where he proposed). This falls into my schedule the day before an 8-mile run, so it should be an easy warm-up. It will probably be too cold to run in my Vibrams that day so I will be forced to run in my old Mizuno Waves. I'm curious to see how it feels.

I adapted the plan from a schedule in the appendix of Dean Karnazes's book 50/50. His "beginner's" marathon training program assumes starting at a point of never running before. Since I run pretty consistently, albeit casually, I was able to put my starting point a few weeks into his program.

While my fiance recommended doing long runs on Saturday and shorter runs/rest days on Sundays, Karnazes recommends Monday being a no run/rest day. I ended up going with this choice, purely for convenience as I have work/class from 8am-9:30pm on Mondays.

I also had to adjust for the time frame that I have. Right now there are 17 weeks until the marathon, and Karnazes's program is 26 weeks. Even shaving off a few weeks for my personal training level I ended up 1 week short of his plan. So, in my final weeks, I squished some things together. My longest run before the marathon will be 20 miles, and that will be the Sunday before the race. This obviously isn't the best situation but I think it will work out ok.

If you look at Karnazes's schedule you'll also notice that there are a lot of "optional" runs. I made sure to put these runs into my schedule as much as possible, unless my work schedule didn't permit. As I plan to be an ultra-runner I think it's important to build up a stamina of running 5-7 days a week.

Today marks my first day of training with a 2-mile run.