What Next? Outlining the Rest of the Year

I just finished up a 12 week training cycle that ended with the MudHen Half Marathon in Wildwood NJ.

The race was a success and I’ve spent the last couple days recovering from a good hard effort. I do have another race coming up this weekend, The Blue Cross Broad Street Run in Philadelphia, but that isn’t a target race and will most likely be an easy long run while I take pictures.

So what’s next?

In the past, after a decent training cycle, I would play it by ear and not really know what I was doing from week to week. Sometimes I would run. Sometimes I would not. Often times I was scouring the internet for my next race, and then would jump into a training plan after a big gap in my running.

Not this year.

This time I have an outline for the rest of the year. And it looks something like this:

As you can see from the calendar I printed, there isn’t much going on.

The red circles are target races. The MudHen Half Marathon just passed. The Rock and Roll Philadelphia Half Marathon is in September. And my A race this year, the Philadelphia Marathon in November.

The blue circles are secondary races. I’ll run these how I feel on that day. As I said the Broad Street run this weekend will be run easy. The Run the Gates 5 Miler in June will be raced. And so far the plan is to also race the Run the Bridge 10K on November 4th, but that might not be run as hard as possible considering it is only two weeks before the Philadelphia Marathon.

The black lines cross out the weeks that have already passed us by this year.

The yellow highlighted weeks mark the 16 weeks that I will be training for the marathon.

And finally the blue highlighted weeks are the weeks that I will keep my running consistent at about 30-35 miles per week. This is mostly easy mileage to maintain a base going into marathon training.

So, why so few races?

Because my focus for the rest of the year is going to be the marathon.

The races leading up to that will be to test my speed, gauge my training, and see how I am progressing.

But this is just an outline.

I can add races here or there if I see any that come up, but those would only be short races. Maybe a 5K or two. Maybe another 10K(but probably not). Definitely nothing like another half marathon or marathon.

I made this outline to help me stay focused. My main destination right now is Marathon Weekend in November and I want everything else I do to work toward that destination.

And once I reach the finish line of the 2018 Philadelphia Marathon I will then assess my running and my fitness and how well I met my goals.

Then, based on that assessment I will create another outline.

Always looking 12-18 months into the future to see how I can develop my running and become a better runner.