Oxygen Deprived

Well, today was officially my first day of marathon training as I've finally managed to come up with a training plan. I know 11 weeks isn't much and for some reason I thought I had longer than that, but once I laid it out that's all there is.

I've been reading Daniels' Running Formula which lays out some really good advice for a 24 week training program which is then dividing into 4 phases. He also realized that runners won't always have 24 weeks and provides some good information for tailoring the program to fit the number of weeks that you do have available. This being said, I know won't be as prepared as I would have been if I had the full 24 weeks but if I stick to what's planned for the next 11 then I should at least do okay. I mean, compared to just running as I normally do.

The other thing that makes me hopeful is that I'm not starting from scratch as I've been running and training already, just not as much, as focused and as serious as I know need to be.

Phase I:

A couple weeks of regular and consistent easy pace runs with some strides thrown in (still need to figure out how to do those) and my first long run towards the end of the second week (probably not much longer than the 10 mile race I recently ran). Nothing hard, just an abbreviated base building phase. I'm still thinking about what my weekly mileage should start at but I'm leaning towards 35 to 40 miles per week. The plan calls for running most every day which shouldn't be a problem. When running 6 or 7 days week with at least 1 run being a long run these miles should divide out pretty easily. Plus, I wanted to have a fair amount of mileage but with the abbreviated program I didn't want to assume that I'd be able to make any big increases later on while also increasing the intensity and quality of my runs.

I also want to focus on increasing my stride rate while performing these easy runs. I read that the average stride rate for successful runners is in the neighborhood of 180 foot falls per minute (90 per foot). I counted mine several times while just running as I normally do and each time it came out to about 152. Then I tried to increase and maintain my stride rate so that I might not only feel what a faster rate feels like but so that I also might get used to it. I thought at first since I'm taking more steps per minute that I would end up running to fast but the problem seems to be the opposite. Since I'm taking more steps I'm trying to make them smaller to maintain an easy pace but I find that I'm going a little too slow. My legs are getting used to turning over quicker though I'm still not getting to the 180s I have been able to maintain in the 160s. Maybe when I'm running at a faster overall pace it will be easier to increase the rate even further. At an easy pace even the 160s feel like my legs are turning over pretty fast compared to how fast I'm actually running.