I modified my plan after some helpful input from the hurt locker. Take a peek and critique if you have the time or give a shit.

BT - haven't forgot about you.  I've actually looked at this off and on over the past couple of days.  Just tying to digest it and understand where you're at now and some of the rationale behind the next 10 weeks of your plan.  I had quite a bit thoughts typed up here in a reply but the page reloaded for some reason and I lost it all.  So I'll try to repeat what I had...  Following are some random notes/observations to consider:

-  Tempo - I see that most of your tempo efforts are 20 minutes.  Why so short?  I would try to stretch those out to get at least 4 miles for starters.  By week 11 or 12, target 6.  Your pace seems appropriate compared to your average easy pace.

-  Long run - what you have looks good.  Good pace target and good plan with trying to throw some quality in there.  Remember, there is nothing wrong with just going out and running long for the sake of running long.  If by doing some of the quality in that run makes you cut it short or beats you up too much, it's better to just get the run in as a longer, easier run than not.

-  Hilly run - what are you looking to do here?  Is it just to incorporate hills in a run or are you actually looking to do hill work?  I would recommend that on any of your runs you try and throw hills in where you can.  It doesn't mean that you are constantly running up and down hills but throughout the course of the run, try to incorporate hills.

-  Steady state - what's the purpose of these in comparison to your easy days?  They're not tempo runs and they're not your everyday easy run.

-  Instead of maintaining the weekly routine of tempo, why not alter some of the quality efforts?  For example, you can get the same impact of a quality workout by doing either fartlek or progression runs and it helps break up the schedule a little bit.

      -  Fartlek: lots of variations here but a good one to do would be (in minutes) 10-8-6-4-2 ON with 1/2 easy jog OFF.  Start out with a 2 mile warmup as usual and then roll into this workout.  Keep your ON @ 10k pace for the 10-8-6 and closer to 5k pace for the 4-2.  Just make sure you keep moving on the OFF portion and jog the recovery.

      -  Fartlek: could be construed as an interval workout but you could easily do 4 x 1 mi @ 10k effort with a 3 min rest in between.  Easy to do on the roads and gets you some good variation in.  Just do your normal 2 mi warmup and regular cooldown too.

      -  Progression run: start out with your usual 2 mi warm-up (@ 9 mpm pace) then do 5 miles of progressing your effort by 10 sec per mile (say 8:40, 8:30, 8:20, 8:10, 8:00).  I like to target 10 miles total for this run with the warm-up and cooldown.  I'll try and get it down to where my last mile is around my 10k pace.

Just some thoughts here for you to consider.  Good luck.

Thanks for the comments. I copied this plan from Grandma's Marathon so I have no real reasons behind what it is calling for. I am just blindly following except I will and do follow it by how I'm feeling. If I feel a recovery need, I will do a recovery run or rest all together.

 

Tempos - I think I may not be as fast as the author of this plan had envisioned a person would be that wanted to follow this plan. For example there is a 7 mile tempo on the plan that is broken down into a 2 mile warm up. 20 minutes at tempo and a 2 mile cool down. The wu and cd are 4 miles and that leaves 3 miles for a twenty minute tempo which is much too fast for me. So i agree with you that I should do a 4 mile tempo run and just adjust the wu and cd a little, then run more then 7 miles.

 

The Med Long, Long runs - I am planning on doing them like I've described on the plan and that would be following Pfitz's Advanced Marathon style. I like that style so I'm doing them again. The original plan did not call for them to be done that way.

 

Hill runs - I've never been big on these and haven't really done them before. I was planning on doing them on the dreadmill. I have a method that I copied from another member that I started to do and was thinking about continuing them. I will start with a wu building up to an easy pace about 2 miles into the run. I would then continue at an easy pace and set the incline to 4% and run for a 1/4 mile, then go back down to 0% for two sets. After those two sets, I'd move up to 4.5% and do two more sets. I would continue that progression until I got my cd of a mile for the total mileage I had on the plan. Does that make sense? HEre is an example:

1	Interval	1.5 mi	14:54.44	14:54.44	9:57	133	140
2	Interval	0.25 mi	2:23.91	17:18.35	9:36	152	159	4.0 % incline
3	Interval	0.25 mi	2:27	19:45.35	9:48	151	159
4	Interval	0.25 mi	2:26	22:11.35	9:44	157	162	4.0 % incline
5	Interval	0.25 mi	2:27	24:38.35	9:48	153	161
6	Interval	0.25 mi	2:24	27:02.35	9:36	159	165	4.5% incline
7	Interval	0.25 mi	2:27	29:29.35	9:48	156	165
8	Interval	0.25 mi	2:25	31:54.35	9:40	161	166	4.5% incline
9	Interval	0.25 mi	2:28	34:22.35	9:52	158	165
10	Interval	0.25 mi	2:24	36:46.35	9:36	162	168	5.0% incline
11	Interval	0.25 mi	2:27	39:13.35	9:48	160	168
12	Interval	0.25 mi	2:25	41:38.35	9:40	163	168	5.0% incline
13	Interval	0.25 mi	2:27.02	44:05.37	9:49	161	168
14	Interval	0.25 mi	2:23.98	46:29.35	9:36	165	170	5.5% incline
15	Interval	0.25 mi	2:28	48:57.35	9:52	163	170
16	Interval	0.25 mi	2:23	51:20.35	9:32	166	171	5.5% incline
17	Interval	0.25 mi	2:28	53:48.35	9:52	164	171
18	Interval	0.25 mi	2:25	56:13.35	9:40	168	174	6.0% incline
19	Interval	0.25 mi	2:28	58:41.35	9:52	164	173
20	Interval	0.25 mi	2:25	1:01:06.35	9:40	168	172	6.0% incline
21	Interval	0.25 mi	2:28	1:03:34.35	9:52	165	173
22	Interval	1 mi	9:55.03	1:13:29.38	9:56	154	162

 

Steady State - The plan called for a pace that was faster the your easy pace, but slower then your LT pace and actually called this day a "Medium Effort" workout. I entered what I felt I could run a 5k time into McMilllan's calculator and used his pace numbers for a Steady-State workout for these workouts. It's basically a couple seconds faster to a couple seconds slower then marathon pace. Maybe that is too fast for these workouts, I don't know.

 

I do like the idea of doing Progression run workouts and may insert them into the plan when I need to do something different. I may also just do a Fartlek style like you mentioned on an interval days. Should I add more 1 mile repaeats T 10k pace instead of the Steady-State workouts?

BT, all your comments make sense.  The overall pattern of what you laid out has structure to it and I'm sure will work.  I'm only throwing out some observations and providing comments as I see fit.  Without knowing your background, training history and what your truly shooting for with the half, I don't want to over-complicate things for you.  For me, the most satisfying part of training and preparing for races is putting in the work and seeing progress over time.  What I do and like for training cycles may or may not work for others.  It's what I have found that my body can adapt to and handle.

With that aside, here are a few other adders:

-  Hill Runs - Your example makes sense.  There are a lot of ways to skin a cat here.  I'll call my hill runs "building" runs as the intent is to work on building strength.  The variation I like is to have a 2 mile warmup followed by 8 x 0.25 mi repeats at a 6-7% incline.  I don't really crank up the speed for these.  I'll just keep it at a steady speed and work on the driving up and pushing off aspect.  Following the hills, I'll either do 6 x 200 m repeats or a "maintenance mile."  Another friend of mine will do a mile warmup and then do the following: incline 1 for a minute, 0 for a minute, 2, 0, 3, 0, 4, 0.....12 and then back down.  Each segment is a minute, ON and OFF.  It's a killer workout but yet another way to get a hill work in.  Short of actually doing true hill workouts, I would suggest trying to build hills in on your everday runs.  I try to do this as much as I can.

-  Steady state - I don't have much experience of these.  I never do them and figure with the pattern of what I try to do, everything else in between is just easy/relaxed running.

Depending on what you feel you can handle for quality workouts will depend on whether you substitute your steady state runs.  With the achilles issues I've faced over the years, I was really only doing one quality and one long run.  Since I've built up more strength, I've been able to handle two quality workouts in a week.  It all depends on where your at.  For me, I'd rather forget the steady state run and try and get a progression or fartlek instead.  Just my opinion though.  Hope this helps.