20 Weeks until the Chicago Marathon, starts now!

This week is week 1 of my 20 week training cycle to the October 11th Chicago Marathon. I am running as part of Team Ronald McDonald Charities (feel free to donate by following this link). I am using a similar plan that I designed for the Wisconsin Marathon, that involves 4 runs a week and 3 weight training sessions. This worked as best as I could have expected given my work schedule and my home schedule for Wisconsin so its a go again.

The plan basics are as follows, runs on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. I have a rest day on Monday, and I do weight training on Tuesday and Friday. On Saturday after my run I have a series of body weight exercises I will do.

I developed the running plan with an eye towards Matt Fitzgerald's excellent book "80/20 Training". The concept of 80/20 is referring to the ratio of slow to high-intensity training. Research is starting to show that even for amateur athletes who train much less than elites, 80/20 training will better improve race performances than high intensity training alone. How slow is slow? Scientists recommend staying below your aerobic threshold, or just below the point where you can no longer talk comfortably while exercising. Which is easy to do for me!

So the plan I have taped to the door to our pantry has the following concepts ingrained in it, (as best as I could make it).

• 3 weeks of increasing mileage then a drop back week for recovery.
• Sunday long runs are never more then 40% of weeks total mileage.
• Once every three weeks I will run my long run on a day where I have a longer then average time frame for recovery.
• I have calculated the 80/20 ratio for each week and average about 82% for the 20 week program.
• The 20% portion of the program, the high intensity stuff, speed work and tempo runs will take place on Thursdays.
• No week will increase by more then 10% in mileage from week to week, obviously excluding the recovery weeks.

So the other things you see, other then my obsession with color coding things, is a total of 655 total miles, 2 half marathons in August as tune ups, and hopefully some major increases in fitness.

• Weeks 7, 11, 14 and 15 I crest 40 miles a week, with a high of 42 for the 20 week cycle.
• Average weekly mileage is 35, (Wisconsin Marathon training program averaged 28).

The Tuesday and Friday weight training sessions are focused on legs, upper body and the core. Key components that appear on all 3 days are planks, pull ups, dips and some flexibility exercises that are running specific. The Saturday workout will be all body weight, mostly focused on the core and stabilizer muscles.

I am going to focus on a few things with a little bit more intensity this training cycle.

• Diet-- I weigh 220 this morning, and I would like to weigh 200-205 in October, which given my past history is doable. However I not obsessed with that, I think that will be a natural result of the above plan. My intent is to eat higher quality food when possible.
• Mileage-- My body handled an average of 28 miles a week for Wisconsin with little issues, but the step up to an average of 35 miles per week is something I need to be aware of and monitor. Since I am 55 years old, and pushing my body to a place it has not been since age 22 or so.
• Resting heart rate-- I monitored that constantly during the last 6-8 months and its interesting to see it slowly drop as I got fitter. My heart rate has always been reasonably low, and my resting rate when I started would average out to about 52-53 first thing in the morning back in October of last year, and slowly it dropped as my training got me fitter, until it was 46 the last week in April. I average the readings for a week to get these numbers. I do watch for large fluctuations which are indicators of impending illness and or over training. Usually a 8-9 beat jump is an indicator of that.

So this is quite a bit of stuff here, but hopefully it will get me to the Chicago Marathon start line in good shape and ready to go.