I am thinking about a plan for my April HM. I ran the same race last year and used the Pfitz HM plan B. That plan starts with a 10 mile LR and 7 mile MLR and 30 MPW, and builds fairly quickly to a peak of 50 MPW with a 14 or 15 mile LR. Last year, this was pretty tough for me as I had only run 10 miles once when I started the plan, and wasn't comfortable doing any quality work while running 30 MPW.
This year I am in a different place. My average for the last couple of months is about 40 MPW, and at least until I started the mileage challenge in Dec., I was able to do quality work comfortably at that mileage. I could probably staet with LRs in the 13-15 range fairly comfortably.
So my question is this. If I decide to do the Pfitz plan again (still considering Daniels, but the next edition of his book has been delayed), should I add a bit to the plan, especially in the early weeks? I know it has a pretty aggressive build, but I can't see how waiting a month to get my LRs up into the HM range would be helpful, and honestly I don't think I need to go all the way back to 30 MPW when I am taking a pretty significant cutback this week.
But I am interested to hear others' thoughts on this. Going up to his "C" plan would be too much of a jump for me
But does it make sense to pad the "B" plan?
Zelanie, I wish I could help you. But I've never used any HM plans since I started running. What I did for my first race, a HM, is use a marathon plan, which I trimmed down (especially the LR, which I kept at no more than 16-17 miles). It worked well for me. Now, I always run my HMs as time trials in preparation for my goal marathons. Do you have a marathon planned for 2014? (ok, I'm trying to bring you over to the dark side, here. Sorry about that. ). Anyway, I hope someone can chime in with better advice than mine!
PRs: Boston Marathon, 3:27, April 15th 2013
Cornwall Half-Marathon, 1:35, April 27th 2013
18 marathons, 18 BQs since 2010
Former Bad Ass
I was in the same position when I was looking at post-surgery training plans for a HM. The Plan C goes better with my current mpw but I could not get the miles high enough post-surgery. On the other hand, Plan B is too low on mileage for me. So, I was going to do the same thing you are considering and add more miles to the first few weeks.
I ended up planning on using the Hanson Advanced HM plan, which is similar to Plan B but I think has more weeks of above 50mpw. It starts as low as Pfitz so I plan on adding more miles to it at the beginning.
Damaris
Are we there, yet?
Doesn't Pfitz give you a lot of flexibility to fill in the non-critical workouts? I'd keep your LRs to what you're used to until the plan catches up to you and pad some of the easy runs if you want, but don't change the quality/speed workouts.
2024 Races:
03/09 - Livingston Oval Ultra 6-Hour, 22.88 miles
05/11 - D3 50K 05/25 - What the Duck 12-Hour
06/17 - 6 Days in the Dome 12-Hour.
Fear is a Liar
This is a good thread. There is always the Ryan Hall plan. I think the Higdon advanced plan is worth a look also.
I'm so vegetarian I don't even eat animal crackers!
Hmm, definitely good food for thought!
Julie- Yes, I am thinking of an October marathon. I do have the Pfitz book, but I haven't looked the plans over to see if I could adjust them for a half.
Damaris- I will look up the Hanson's plan!
wcrunner- That is what I was thinking about doing. Padding the LRs to what I'm used to, and maybe adding some to the easy runs so that I'm at my "normal" mileage. But I wouldn't add to the speedwork.
Gustav- Ryan Hall has more speedwork than I'm comfortable with, and I've always felt like Higdon placed too much of the weekly mileage in the LR. I haven't looked at his advanced plan, though.
The Ryan Plan is also low in mileage for what Z is looking at.
Zelanie, as you are looking at all of those plans, what strikes me is that you know enough now to develop your own plan.
Start with this. Think about weekly mileage. What is it now? How much do you want to be running at your peak? There is certainly no reason to cut back to some arbitrary weekly mileage just because a plan starts at that mileage. How is your mileage divided? What percentage of your weekly mileage is wrapped up in one long run. Ideally, you'd like to get that down to about 30% but 35% is OK.
Once you think about weekly mileage, think about your strengths and weaknesses. You will find two schools of thought on this but I'll give you mine. My preference is to start by working on my strengths, then as I get closer to the race, start working on my weaknesses, and then, as I get within a month or so of the race, start doing a lot of race specific workouts. Daniels plans and Pfitizinger's plans aren't all that different but Daniels works on speed before developing stamina and endurance while Pfitzinger develops stamina before turning to speed and endurance. Neither do as many race specific workouts as I would like. I know that stamina has always been my weakness while speed is my strength so I tend to gravitate to Daniels type plans.
Now that you know your strengths and weaknesses, decide on your quality workouts each week. They should build in both intensity and distance. For example, tempo runs early on might consist of cruise intervals where you run 5 x 1 mile at tempo pace and then take a 90 second break before doing it again. Closer to the race, you'd be doing 5 mile continuous tempo runs. Your VO2max intervals might be something like 6 x 800 early on and build to something like 6 x 1,200 with 400 recoveries (and that is one damned hard workout).
You have to decide how much quality work you can handle. Most plans have two quality workouts plus a long run each week. I can't do that. What I do is to alternate. I'll do two quality workouts one week and then one quality workout plus a long run the next week. That's simply a function of the fact that I'm 51 rather than 21. If the weekly work schedule wasn't an issue, I'd do a quality run every three days with every third quality day being a long run.
Last but not least, make your long run a true quality day. Too many people just jog them. Insert some speed into your long runs. You can do that in any number of ways. Try a fast finish in which you run the last 1/4 of the run 30 seconds per mile faster than you have been running. Insert 10 x 1 minute pickups with 1 minute recoveries into a long run after you've been on your feet 8-10 miles. Do a progression run like 3 miles recovery jog pace + 3 miles easy pace + 3 miles marathon pace + 3 miles tempo. On a 15 mile long run, do something like 2 miles easy + 4 miles marathon pace + 5 miles easy + 2 miles marathon pace + 2 miles easy.
Short term goal: 17:59 5K
Mid term goal: 2:54:59 marathon
Long term goal: To say I've been a runner half my life. (I started running at age 45).
Here's Higdon Advanced. What I like is he has a lot of miles at pace. I think it definitely has to be modified. I Gustafied his 5k plan so you can Zelanize his Half plan! What happens is these are canned plans that may work for some but not for us. By adding miles to Mon and Wed and also add maybe a 2 mile warm up/ 2 mile cool down to the Tues intervals you can really build up the plan with easy miles. Also, I wouldn't race every 3 weeks.
Uffda
I do like his HM Advanced plan. I used it for a race in 2012 and it worked out well. He does have pretty rough Tempo runs, but I don't really care of the weak mileage. Add in a MLR and up the Easy mileage a bit and it'd be a good overall plan.
For my 2013 HMs I preferred a plan put out by Dick Beardsley. I just checked and he hasn't put one online for 2014. It had that MLR and used 2 quality workouts. Regardless of which plan you choose, it sounds like you'll need to tailor it to your needs a bit.
- Andrew
Yes, I could design my own plan for this half, and that's more or less what I did for the fall, when I knew that I was building back from injury and had to be careful with my training.
I found that I do pretty well with building my overall mileage and LRs. But I don't feel that I know enough about V02Max or Tempo runs to design them intelligently. When I'm headed into a workout that somebody else designed, I'm always a little nervous about whether I'll be able to get it done, and am usually pleasantly surprised by the end that I was able to do it. When I make up my own, I don't think I set the bar high enough honestly. With some more experience running other people's workouts, I think I would be able to design a workout with the right amount of challenge.
My weakness right now is stamina. And I need to get back up to my regular training paces after letting that completely slide in December.
One thing I noticed is that the speed work is very similar between Pfitz's Plan B and Plan C. So it would be pretty simple to just follow the speed-work schedule in B, and add whatever miles you think you can tolerate to the schedule. Or you could follow the lactate threshold workouts in plan C, which are a little more aggressive and would probably help with stamina, but drop the weekly miles down to what is doable for you.
I'm jumping into Plan B myself -- I was supposed to start it 3 week ago, but the 2014in2014 kind of consumed my normal training. I'm now picking it up for the last 12 weeks. I hope I can do as well as you did on it.
Life is good.
I used the Pfitz 15k to HM plan B with about 10 mpw added to train for a half in fall 2012. Worked well for me and I ran a pretty big PR.
I am doing my own thing for my goal half this spring. It is a jump off of my 5k & 10k training, with an adjustment for more miles.
Whatever you decide I would just recommend that you embrace the 10k, and/or make tempo runs an integral part of your training.
Or don't.
Tempo runs suck, but not as much as not realizing your goal on race day.
I am doing my own thing for my goal half this spring. It is a jump off of my 5k & 10k training, with an adjustment for more miles. Whatever you decide I would just recommend that you embrace the 10k, and/or make tempo runs an integral part of your training. Or don't. Tempo runs suck, but not as much as not realizing your goal on race day.
It is much more fun to argue but I can't. You are completely correct.