4 Mar 2014

My Training Plan: Divergence from the Official Plan

While I have been enjoying the SportMedBC (and Vancouver Sun) Learn to Run 10K program, at this point in my training, I am making a choice to diverge from the Learn to Run 10K program.  I am doing this for one simple reason: time.

The Learn to Run 10K program is excellent and I enjoy it.  It has taught me how to build natural progression into my training rather than simply running farther and longer every day.  It has taught me that every week I should have a big run, a rest run, and a moderate run.  It has taught that intervals are good and established runners use them too.  All of these things are important lessons to any runner, whether you're training for a marathon, half marathon, or even a 5k.

However, I am busy and I am not training for anything in particular.  My goal, ultimately, is to teach myself to run and to increase my overall physical health.  So with my current schedule that I run during my lunch, I need to limit my runs to 45 minutes.  On the weekends, I can treat myself to a longer run but, in general, my runs will be 45 minutes.  So when I was looking at the Learn to Run 10K program for week 9, I realized that the time is just getting too long for what I am able to commit to on a regular basis.

So from this point forward, I am going to develop my own training plan using the same methodology as the Learn to Run 10K program, but with a soft 45 minute time limit in mind.  For this week (which is my week 10 because I repeated week 3), I am going to use the following training sessions:


On Monday (yesterday) I completed Session 1 and it was a great run in the rain.  I finished at 9.02km with an average pace of 5:36/km, which I am quite happy with.  Wednesday (tomorrow) it's on to Session 2.  And based on my results up to this point, I am confident that I can still be training for a 10km anyway.  I believe that if I increase my pace slightly and eventually work out the walking intervals, I can achieve 10km within this time.

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