Here Comes A New Season

So I have now had two weeks off since I completed the JW 30 Mile Ultra Race. That race was the end of my season. I have been running for 3 years now and that was my first successful season which I was able to complete and compete. I ran 5 races in this season and got personal records on them all! My next season starts this week and this seasons grand finale is the A Week at the Knees in March – 7 marathons in 7 days.

I have done much more research this last few months on how to correctly structure my training plans for the next coming season starting next week. This will be the first time I have followed a solid personal training schedule.

I will be having 20 weeks of foundation training. In this phase I will be running between 65-75% Max HR. This is within the aerobic zone. Running in this zone will help to build my aerobic capacity, help me become faster and also help my body to do some crucial building in preparation for the strains of both higher mileage and speed work later on.
There will be no speed work within this element of my training. I will be taking part in a few events, but I do not anticipate racing these. I shall just be using them as training.
There will of course be a weekly long run which will increase each week and on the 4th week be reduced to prevent plateauing and crashing in my training.
Once a month I intend on running calorie depleted long runs of between 2 and 3 hours without taking on any fuel apart from water and electrolytes. This also means no breakfast before the run. This will help me to better utilise the stores already in my body before the addition of more fuels to help keep me going. I will also be running some back to back long runs on weekends. Most of my training will be peaking at 70 miles in this phase.

Phase 2 will be lasting 8 weeks and will be incorporating a 2 week taper and the 3rd week will be a week of running a marathon every single day for A Week at the Knees event in Milton Keynes in March 2016. Of course the biggest challenge here is getting to the start line. Then recovering, then training lol. I will be adding some easy speed training in the this phase. I have purposefully made my speed work all fartlek sessions between 70-90% MAX HR. This is so I can just go by how I feel and not be overly strict and overdo it.

Throughout my training there’ll be a stress on body weight strength training once a week, regular flexibility exercises and post workout stretches and finally a set of different drills will be done weekly.