A plan

I found myself this morning in desperate need of a plan. A club marathon I had signed up to months ago and kept forgetting about is now suddenly two weeks away. A bigger race, the Lakeland 50 (LL50) which consists of 50 miles and 10,000ft of ups and downs, has also crept up on me and is 14 weeks away.

My main problem is over the last 12 weeks I've been for 7 runs totalling 54 miles and I'm seriously out of shape. Now I don't have a problem with the lack of running, other things have needed to take priority for my time and energy but it's time for that to change. I've been missing running and so I need to choose a solid goal to start training towards.

The marathon is pretty close but I have no concerns over finishing it. I would need to take it slow and actually plan/include walking breaks but with my base fitness from previous training and experience over that sort of distance I know I would finish without being in too bad a state. The LL50 is another beast, it's a little further than I've ran (though I have several runs close to it so not too worried) but the climbs and descents are pretty far out of my comfort zone (and I'm a fan of hills).

My original plan, or more like idea, was to run/walk the marathon, cancel the LL50 and maybe do some other long runs that I come up with myself. That would be pretty achievable but I was a little worried that since I wouldn't really be pushing myself it also wouldn't push me to start training properly like I want to. There's also the fact the LL50 is basically a bucket list race for me. I was lucky enough to get in via the lottery (it's become so popular they have a lottery system for entry rather than normal entry) last year and was meant to be running it last July (when I was much fitter) but obviously Covid had other plans. So today I decided it was finally time to make a decision and a proper plan.

The decision

So this morning I started to look at some training plans and seeing how realistic it would be for me to complete the LL50 with 14 weeks of training and whatever base fitness remains. To my slight surprise, I'm pretty confident I can follow some of the plans. So decision made? Sort of. I'm going to start a 16 week training plan at the end of week 2 and I'm going to follow it for the next 4 weeks. After that I'm going to assess how I'm doing with the increase in running and how confident I am of being able to finish the LL50 before making a final decision about my entry (there would be plenty of people on a waiting list that would take my place).

This means I'm cancelling the marathon in 2 weeks time. As I said I'm sure I could do it but there wouldn't be much benefit and it would likely have a pretty negative impact on my training that has now become a priority. So 4 weeks of training to follow. If things go well I'll continue training but also look at tweaking the plan for a bit more specificity. If things don't go so well I'll decide on a different challenge to work towards (I still have a long 69ish mile coastal route to finish that defeated me last year) and I should hopefully at least be back in the swing of training properly again.

So for a bit of accountability I'm going to publish my next week's training here and plan to review how I'm getting on each Sunday and publish the next week's plan.

Next week

Day	Session
Monday	Rest
Tuesday	60 mins easy
Wednesday	15 mins easy, 7 x 1 min fast with 75-sec recoveries, 15 mins easy
Thursday	S&C
Friday	5 mins easy, 35 mins at long pace, 5 mins easy
Saturday	Rest
Sunday	12 miles at long pace

Today

A bit mixed in chronology but with my new found motivation I went out for a 10 mile run today that was the last run of week 2 on the plan I found on runners world. Originally I was going to run around 16 as a test for the marathon (2 weeks training for a marathon definitely isn't optimal) so it was felt like a shorter run as I had mentally prepared to be out for over 2.5 hours. Anyway, the photo at the top was taken while out on a local coastal route from my house.