April (Not Fools) Plan – Half Marathon, Baby!

First of all, let me call out that this is NOT an April Fools post.  If it was, I’d probably post that I was going to try one creation from here daily.  Or that I was going to try the Acai berry stuff the ads keep pushing on me.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, you must have a good ad blocker, so I won’t even bother with a link.  Nope, this is the real deal folks.  I am going to attempt to run 13.1 miles approximately 12 weeks from now.  I can currently run just over 6.  Crazy?  I know…but sounds like a good challenge.

How did I arrive at this?  Blame Fitness Magazine.  I’ve commented various places that I really don’t care for fitness-y magazines, but Zliten has made it a habit to collect all of our Coke point codes and put them into the website.  Since we didn’t really want them to send us random Coca Cola merch and kitchy things to clutter up the house, we started getting bathroom fodder, I mean, uh, magazine subscriptions.  So we got through Wired and EGM and decided the next one was Fitness, I mean why not, it’s free.  I have to say I’ve actually enjoyed reading it, I found a really awesome curried veggie and chickpea recipe I want to try, though there is a lot of crap in it (one article criticized a subject’s fridge because they didn’t have whole grains, but the next recipe had white rice).

However, last month’s mag had something that caught my attention – half marathon training.  They said that you could start from nothing and run a half marathon in 2 months.  The training schedule seemed a little weaksauce to me – I think it jumped from 10 or 11 miles as the long run the week before the race right up to 13.1.  Personally, I do NOT feel comfortable with that at all.  Two months to more than double my distance also seemed like the stuff major injuries are made out of, so I set it aside.  Sorta.  Instead, the idea of running anything with the word marathon (even if it’s got the modifier half in front of it) sounded awesome and empowering.  So I decided that instead of what I had planned this month, I was going to look into a half marathon training program, though one that seemed a bit more sane.

After reading through training programs from Runner’s World, Hal Higdon, Jeff Galloway, marathontraining.com, marathonrookie.com, and Cool Running, I frankensteined together my own plan taking into account that I don’t want to drop my 2 sessions of yoga per week or my 2 sessions of strength training, I don’t want to run 5, 6, or 7 days per week (cross training for the win), I don’t feel comfortable increasing my mileage more than 1 mile per week.  Actually, I barely feel comfortable increasing my mileage more than 1 mile a month, but this is where the experiment is – reaching out of my comfort zone here.

Since this is a 3 month endeavour, this is going to eat up April, May, and most of June’s experimental time.  Every Monday, I plan to post about my training for the last week and what next week’s schedule is.  Since I started 2 days ago, here is this week’s plan:

Monday: 3 mile treadmill run + full body weights at the gym

Tuesday: yoga and 4×400 pace run at the track (1 lap warmup, 1 lap 5k pace, 1 lap jog, repeat pace and jog 3 times, 1 lap cooldown)

Wednesday: 30 minutes DDR and yoga

Thursday: 3 mile outside run + full body weights at home

Friday (or Saturday): 5 mile run

Saturday (or Friday): Rest

Sunday: Rest

Total week 1 mileage: 13.5.  Rest may or may not involve a bike ride one of those days.

If you’re interested in the nitty gritty details – I’m going to be tracking everything here as well.  Because the site is kinda nifty and sakkath sent it to me.

This is actually a pretty mellow week for me.  I was all pumped on Monday to start on this endeavour and then I looked at the training spreadsheet I made myself (yeah, I am a project manager, sue me) and realized – yep, except the fact I’m running 4 out of the 5 days, this is actually downgraded a bit from my normal workout.  No matter, I’ll have enough weeks of crazy soon enough.

Weights:

Just to change things up, I’m going to start varying my weight routine.  I mean, I change exercises and up my weights and reps, but I really wanted to try something different.  So, I’m going to change one day a week to either 1 set to failure instead of 3 to a certain number (so instead of doing 3 sets of 32 calf raises, I’m going to sit there and calf raise until I cannot… do… another…, and then move on to the next exercise), or 1/2 the reps, double the time per rep (which I hate, hate, hate – I think weights should be secondary cardio and I try to hit as many muscles/machines as I can in the time I have).  This week, I’m going to try 1 rep to exhaustion on Thursday.  Should be interesting!

Eating:

Well, I’ve found that I am just not happy when I limit myself so much the weight falls off at the rate that makes me happy.  So I can either be happy with the amount of food I’m taking in and feeling fueled for my training, or I can feel happy when I jump on the scale and can say that I am of normal BMI sooner than later but feel exhausted and cranky.  I choose, for the next 3 months, the former.  While I’m not going to try and stop losing weight, I am going to boost up the amount of calories I eat by a little, and try to be a little more intuitive.  At the end of the day, if I’m still hungry, I’ll allow myself another serving of veggies/fruit/lean protein to satiation even if it’s a little more calories than I would like.  I think I screw myself when I go to bed hungry and have that hanging over myself the next morning.  Now, if I am hankering for an ice cream but fruit sounds nasty?  Then, I can let it go, because obviously THEN I’m just cravey.

The plan is to start at 1500 calories per day (average, if I have a crazy weekend day then I just have to balance it out) and follow my appetite.  When I’m running 20+ miles a week, I’m pretty sure I’m going to also need to have a little more fuel.  My little sparkulator thing says I can eat between 1350-1700 calories to lose 1 lb per week, and goddamn if I wouldn’t be thrilled doing that right now.  So there it is.

The culmination of this endeavour in late June?  Well, since it’s hotter than hell here in Austin there are no half marathons between April and October.  Either I’ll search around and find an official race to run and travel, or I’ll host my own.  I’ve already recruited some friends to sit in my front yard that morning and drink beer and hand me water and gel packs, and I have a fantastic 2.7 mile lap around my neighborhood I’m comfortable with.  Plus, seeing my friends lounging and drinking beer will probably make me want to run faster, so I can after that, lounge and drink beer.

One final note.  I am still at approximately 1 pack of American Spirit Lights per week, the majority of which are consumed with major amounts of booze.  As always, I’m trying to continue to whittle down my smoking until I can take it or leave it (and then leave it), but I am also interested if a very casual smoker can actually do the mileage.  I figure somewhere before marathoning I’ll have to make a choice (smokes or distance/times), but I’m curious when that will be.

Anyone out there done a half marathon?  Anyone want to talk me out of my insanity and instead have April be a “sit on the couch and eat ice cream” experiment?  You know where to find me…