Learn | Make | Fix | Run

Week 2 in the books. The plan is merely a guide. This week has been a great week of running. The Hal Higdon Advanced Marathon 1 plan prescribed about 30 miles this week. There were two three-mile recovery runs, two five-mile base runs, a 15-minute tempo, and an 11-mile long run. When I started the Run with Hal program, I entered that my easy pace was 10:30/mile and my marathon goal time was 4:30. From there, it did the calculations for all my runs, and they are a great guide. From what I have seen about low heart rate training and what I heard on multiple YouTube running videos is to keep your easy days easy and your hard days hard. Taking that into account and the purpose of each run, I have developed a decision tree for when I want to hit the prescribed paces and when I want to stay in heart rate zone 2. For my recovery runs, I plan to stay in Z1. For the base runs, I plan to stay in Z2. For the warmup and cool downs of the hill repeats, tempo runs, and interval workouts, I plan to s...

Week 1 of Marathon Training in the Books I’m training for the Mountains 2 Beach Marathon on May 21, 2023. I am using the Hal Higdon Advanced 1 Marathon Training plan, which started on January 16. I plan to give a weekly update and share what I have learned. The marathon plan started on Monday with a recovery run; however, my lesson from this week comes from the base training I did the two weeks prior. Because of the rain, I was wearing my oldest pair of shoes. I knew I was running on borrowed time, but the shoes still felt good. I figured getting the old pair wet rather than a newer one was better. I ran on Tuesday, January 10 and felt good in the shoes. The following day, the shoes turned into torture devices halfway through the run. The cushioning appeared to disappear, and my heels started to hurt immensely. On Monday’s recovery run, I had my epiphany. It wasn’t worth trying to get extra miles on my shoes. I track my shoes, and typically I can get at least 400 miles per pair. I look...