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.

Marathon Chosen

Saturday May 8th I will run a marathon in Saint Joseph, MN; the Lake Wobegon Trail Marathon. Of course, it isn't an actual trail race. The trail is FLAT and PAVED....a pretty easy course as far as marathons go. I'll move onto trail races later.

This gives me 17 weeks to train. I was planning on waiting until fall to run one but my fiance, who is crazyrunnerguy for a reason, convinced me that I can do it sooner. I'll be planning my training around the beginner's guide in Dean Karnazes's book 50/50.

Of course, this is contingent upon his availability to participate as my pacer...but, depending on how my training goes, I might just do it without it.

**Edit** Find my training schedule here