My 18 week training plan for the Chicago Marathon officially starts today!
Here’s the schedule I created, tweaked from this Hal Higdon Plan
Excel formatting is one of my favorite forms of self expression
Here’s the gist of it:
Mondays: Easy run
Tuesdays: Strength training and yoga at the gym (or other cross training)
Wednesdays: Easy run
Thursdays: Speed work
Fridays: Bike to work- about an 11 mile round trip (or other cross training)
Saturdays: Long run
Sundays: Recovery day and foam rolling
For the Thursday speed workouts, I’m planning to rotate between these drills:
Fartlek: Pick up the pace for segments of 30 seconds to four minutes, interspersed with easy-paced segments of similar duration. Go by time or run them between trees, street signs, or other landmarks during your run.
Kenyan Outbacks: These are like tempo runs—a few miles at a challenging pace—but with the second half much faster than the first. Example: Run an out-and-back route with the “out” in 20 minutes and the “back” in 17 minutes.
Track ladders: Do a track workout up and down the distance ladder. Early in the buildup the ladder range can be 200 to 800 meters; later on it can rise to 800 to 1600 meters. Example: Run 200, 400, 800, 400, and 200. Include an equal amount of slow jogging to recover between each faster repeat.
Yasso 800s: In the early weeks of the schedule, run six 800-meter repeats with 400-meter recovery jogs. Increase the number to 10 during peak training.
Hill repeats: Focus on form, not speed. In the early weeks, run four to six times up a moderate hill of 100 to 200 meters at an easy effort. Walk or jog down. In the middle of the training plan, simply do some tempo and long runs on hilly routes. Late in the buildup, run three to eight hill repeats of 100 to 400 meters at a medium to hard effort.
And of course this drill:
YIPEEEEEEEE
