My first half marathon of the year is coming up this Sunday so it’s about time I shared the plan for the first couple months of 2012 with you guys.
As you know, one of my goals for 2012 is to be more consistent with my running. I’m not running any full marathons this year and have five half marathons already scheduled! I wanted to try to run one per month but weather, travel schedules and available local races haven’t made that totally possible. I’m still lookin’ though so we’ll see!
The aggressive race schedule should help me maintain a great fitness level and also increase my speed which will hopefully improve my chances of meeting another 2012 goal, to PR in the half.
Here’s how I plan to do it…
I’m running 4 days a week. The three runs during the work week are about 5 – 7 miles each on average and the long run on the weekend varies from 8 to 14 miles depending on where I am with my racing schedule. Last year I had a “yoga/stretch” day on Mondays and a rest day on Fridays and found that I basically made both into a drink-lots-of-wine do-nothing-at –all day, defeating the yoga/stretch concept completely. This year, Monday and Friday are yoga days and thanks to my physical therapist I’ve finally realized that I don’t need to let my publicworkoutclassphobia hold me back from practicing so I bought a couple DVDs and practice yoga in the comfort of my own home. Lastly, as you may have
just read I joined a women’s soccer team and for the next couple months Sundays are for soccer!
I work with physicians so my meetings center around patient office visit hours and can start as early as 7 AM and end as late as 10 PM. With this kind of schedule, making sure I cross things off daily on the training plan can be a challenge so I don’t obsess over whether things are completed on the exact day that they are scheduled for or not. I try, but I don’t trip if it doesn’t happen. For example, Tuesdays are a running day but with work it’s tough sometimes to make sure I get the miles in when I have so many early AND late work meetings in the same day. So, I may do yoga (in my house at 5 AM instead of run outside in the dark) and swap my run for Friday, which is how the schedule can end up looking like this…
(The Chef apparently added an inspirational note to the schedule this morning. He also did the dishes which means 1 of 2 things: 1) he did something he needs to make amends for, or 2) I really do ROQ! ;))
KEY:
X = completed
— = not completed
\ = (not shown but means…) half completed
A couple of things to note – if I miss a run during the week I still try to make it up (if that seems reasonable) the following week (but if not, that’s OK). As you can see above, I missed a couple runs (I also missed some soccer!). I was sick and it didn’t make sense to run so many miles the next week so I let it go. Yoga however, is non-negotiable. I HAVE to make it up. This is only because I know how much it will benefit my running, it’s only 30 minutes at the minimum and I can do it at home, whenever I want – how can you make excuses NOT to complete that?!
I’ve learned a lot about excuses in the last year and this year, I can’t be bothered with them 😉 So here’s to 2012! And I’ll let you know how Sunday turns out.
Balanced Footsteps 