Marathon Training Schedule Week 5

Last week was week 4 of my 18 week Marathon Training Schedule and after 3 weeks of consistent mileage I stepped back with an easy week. This was down to two reasons. The first was that it is always a good idea to let your body recover after it has been put under stress through a higher than usual stress load. The second was because, for two full days, I have been busy applying stain to my brand new pool deck.

This second factor was probably the major reason for the easy week which actually only totalled 23km. Starting at 8am and working all day through to 5pm with a short break for lunch left me with no time for a run. This was during the week when I had to take a day off work to do the job.

I followed that up on Sunday – normally the day of my long run – to put in another full day staining the edges. I now have a wonderfully spiffy looking pool deck, very sore knees but otherwise refreshed and ready to continue on with my schedule.

This week I plan to step the weekly distance up another level. My training schedule for the week looks like this:

Monday : 10km – medium effort
Tuesday 0k : Rest day
Wednesday : 11km – easy effort
Thursday : 10km easy effort
Friday : 11km – hard effort
Saturday : 0km – rest day
Sunday : 16km – long run

This gives me a total mileage for the week of 58km and should be a good lead in to my first week that will incorporate some interval training. So far all of my training has involved easy or medium effort runs which is fine for running at the same pace all the time. I find that when I’ve incorporated speed sessions into my training my cardio-respiratory system improves dramatically, I can recover during runs a lot more quickly and my times begin to drop dramatically.

By the way, 3 weeks to go until the Sutherland to Surf.