Recently, I promised I was going to follow some kind of programme in the run up to the London Marathon. I’ve been looking at various such schedules. I’ve found two so far – one is from Ivan Bisaro at Carmichael Systems (Trainright.com) and the other is from the famed Hal Higdon.
Both require 5 runs a week – 20 or 21 runs a month – and from 5 to 8 hours a week in actual running. Higdon wants you to run 134 miles in the 4 weeks preceding the week of the marathon; Bisaro (who measures his programme in time on your feet) wants you to run 20 3/4 hours.
Running for that kind of time (or distance) per week struck me as amazingly hard to achieve so I thought I’d check what I’d managed since I started tracking my stats in September 2005. The graph below shows how many hours I’ve run per week (the bars, left axis) and, out of interest, my average pace (the line, right axis).
You can quickly see that I’ve very rarely got to 5 hours in a week – call it perhaps 4 times in total. I’m thinking that trying to do it every week will probably kill me. I need a different plan.
Interesting new comments box.s Almost feels like a Web 2.0 drag-able window.sIf you do three hours\’ running during the week immediately before the London Marathon, then assuming your history of rarely running over five hours, you should get a very good time for the Marathon.s No?
Interesting new comments box.s Almost feels like a Web 2.0 drag-able window.sIf you do three hours\’ running during the week immediately before the London Marathon, then assuming your history of rarely running over five hours, you should get a very good time for the Marathon.s No?
I\’m not sure that\’s how it works Dan … in the week before the marathon i\’ll probably do an hour and a half or so at most.s some fancy thing runners call the taper