Sometimes it’s good to give life a blank slate. Work things from scratch in order to get a different perspective or meaning. Considering that the end of the year is jam packed with half marathons, I decided to give this a shot. Where in the past I’ve pretty much treated running as something I love doing on a whim and races as just another run with many people around me, I’ll be using the next couple of weeks to actually train for the half. Yup, that means setting goals, sticking to a regime and all that jazz. I figured, why not give it a try.
The program I’m trying out is the FIRST Plan, which advocates a 3-day week training schedule over the course of 10 weeks. Theoretically, I like this plan for a couple of reasons. It’s just 3 days a week which helps since I’m quite tied up getting runfool off the ground. The 3 days are segmented into very structured components; i.e. one speedwork, one tempo run and one long run every week. Also, being the plodder that I am, I’ve totally neglected trying to speed up my run which was fine when I was doing it for more “abstract” reasons. 
So, this is something that’s going to add a new perspective to my running.
First Up
This plan begins with the end in mind. And for me, that is a 2:30 half marathon. Having that goal in place, the plan requires me to identify my “half-marathon race pace” or HMP, which comes to about 11:30 per mile. That will be the golden figure to use as I set out to complete the 3 types of training runs; i.e. speed works at a pace of between 10:15 to 10:45, tempo runs at a pace of 11:15 and long runs at a pace of 12:00
What happens this week?
So, armed with my brand new sports band and my trusty pair of shoes, this will be my work out for the week.
Tuesday: 20-min jog (warm-up), 4x400m with 2-min recovery jog between, 10-min jog (cool down)
Wednesday: 10-min jog, 3-mile tempo run, 10-min jog
Saturday: 6-mile long run
Will be posting an update by the end of the week with a report on how it went.
