The Plan is Merely a Guide

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 stay in Z2. For the speed portions of those workouts, I will let my heart rate get as high as it needs to get the job done. I will do the same for the marathon pace runs as the speed portions of the other workouts. For the long runs, I will stay in Z2.

This means that there are runs when I will not hit the prescribed pace because I am staying in Z2, and I have given myself permission to be okay with that. It’s one thing to say that you are okay with it, and it is another thing actually to be okay with it. That has been my lesson this week. I have learned that I am okay not hitting the paces. I am okay with scoring less than 100% on the compliance meter in Run with Hal. I am okay with my training status dipping towards the undertrained in my “Hal Says” report. 

Have you ever deviated from a running plan? Comment below with your experience.

P.S. Running in Z2 can be boring; I’ll share what I do to motivate me to stay in Z2 in a future post.

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