"There's only one hard and fast rule in running: sometimes you have to run one hard and fast."








Saturday, February 18, 2012

An Ideal 3:00 Marathon Training Week

Yesterday I posted a training week plan I found in an old file. I've been at this for so long that I tend to gravitate to the new and unexplored. Here's what I would aim for if I ever trained to run a sub-3 again.

Monday: 11 miles in 90 minutes
Tuesday: 8 in 60, with 3x1 mile in 6:00 - 3 min. recovery
Wednesday: 8 in 60 fartlek
Thursday: 11 in 90
Friday: 0
Saturday: 9 in 60 (marathon pace, no warm-up)
Sunday: 20 in 2:45

A 10K race on Saturday (38-39 minutes) would, with warm-up and cool-down, be 9 in 60.
The Wednesday run is a fast continuous run, with about a dozen faster segments of 200-400m, a few sprints and done on rolling hills; this makes for a fairly difficult run after the Tuesday intervals.

Let's give this plan a name: Xylia.
Xylia B.
[Whenever I have posts that don't have photos of their own, I'm going to add one like this, until I stop thinking it's amusing.]

4 comments:

C said...

You post photos of redheads and I post dinosaur images. We're both weird, sad creatures, Steve. At least we have each other.

pensive pumpkin said...

At least you vary your redheads. I just stalk the internet for photos of Alan Rickman. Some of them get posted. Some I just paste in my Trapper Keeper. (I am just kidding about the Trapper Keeper part. Please don't call the FBI.)

nwgdc said...

Is this a week that should be repeated throughout the training, or a week that one should aim to be able to complete during the peak time of training, before tapering?
Man, if I could complete the two weeks you've posted here, I think I'd consider that a bigger accomplishment than breaking 3 hours!

Marathon 10k said...

That was a great marathon training, thanks for sharing ! It was a nice post !