Run 2014: Plans & Goals

The history of my running career is short, choppy, and looks something like this:

2012:
January: Begin training for Huff 50K
April: Run Winona Lake 10 mile and love it.
August: Tendonitis begins.
September: Run Fort4Fitness half marathon and, wow! So much fun!
October: Take a month long break to go to New Zealand.
November: Pick running back up and immediately get hit by the tendonitis again.
December: Admit that there's no way I can run a 50K in two weeks and drop out. Sad day.

2013:
March to October: Struggle to get into the groove again and only run 13 times.
December: Realize that I really, really, really want to try for the Huff 50K again. 

2014:
January: Decide with Justin to commit to the training for the Huff 50K.
March: The snow finally melts enough to start training! Here we go!


Currently:
When you look at all this it makes us seem kind of crazy. In 2011 we decided that we wanted to run both the Fort4Fitness and the Huff 50K. We weren't currently training and we had never been true runners. In fact the farthest that I had ever run was 2 miles just for fun. 

Crazy we might be but we're back at it again. This time I'm smarter and more determined than ever. We started our training on March 15th which gave us 41 weeks until the Huff and 29 until the Fort4Fitness half. It should be doable. And I'm super duper excited to get back to running!

Because it had been five months since we last ran, we started at 3 mile runs this March. That was a very comfortable length for me. Our runs were hit and miss for the few three weeks because it was still snowing occasionally so we've only built up to 4 mile runs.

To build up to the first 9miles or so, we're using Hal Higdon's 15K plan. This was the plan we used in the spring of 2012 to train for the Winona Lake 10 mile and we felt like it gave us a nice strong base to build off of. It's a ten week plan and we're currently running week four.

We'll be done with this plan on May 24th (Memorial Day Weekend) and will evaluate what we want to do next. There are lots of options out there for half and full marathon training and most of them would probably work just fine. 31 miles isn't that much more than 26.2 to really make a huge difference in training strategies.

The main challenge is that we'll have 18 weeks until the half marathon and 30 until the 50K. That leaves us in a bit of no mans land since most plans run around 16 weeks. What we'll probably end up doing is adapting/combining two plans to gradually build us from 9 miles up to marathon length. I have no idea what that'll look like but we have a good six weeks or so to figure it out.

So there you have it. We're training for two races this year, a half and a 50K. We've picked a training strategy that will take us through Memorial Day/9 miles and after that we'll just see what happens!