Make a new plan Stan

My recovery from the Six Foot has gone well. Basically I felt pretty ‘normal’ after a couple of days. I’ve had quite a few days with no running as you can see from my real blog. After each day off I’ve felt good. These days off have hinted to me that perhaps I’ve neglected to schedule enough easy or rest days in my training program. When you’re young and foolish it’s possible to get away with a few back-to-back hard days. You can’t get away with it when you’re old and creaky.

My new training plan is going to include scheduled easy days and nil days. The easy days will be 20 to 45 minutes of slow running. Slow for me is 5:45 per kilometre pace or slower.

On either side of the easy or nil days will be more purposeful training sessions. I want to include the following ‘hard’ sessions:

• A long run of up to 30 kilometres.
  
• A ‘long’ track session such as 5 x 800 metres.
  
• A faster medium-long run such as 17k at 5:10/km or quicker.
  
• A shortish race or time trial of 3 to 5 kilometres.
  

I plan to run a ‘serious’ race every two or three weeks. This will be a race where I have a couple of easy days and a shorter track session beforehand. One of my goals for 2005 was to run a 5000m in 19:08. This is two minutes faster than a recent 5k so it doesn’t seem easy. Stan, maybe the new plan will help. What do you think?