My Current Training Plan

Okay, I just want to start off with this.  My wife and I usually have some type of green smoothie as part of our breakfast.  We've been giving our son, who's 19 months old, a little as well.  Sometimes he likes it and other times he doesn't.  Well this morning we had eggs and toast along with it and he was dipping his toast into his green smoothie--definitely more daring than I.  He was eating it, funny kid.

Alright, so I thought it would be good to tell you exactly what my training plan is currently and how I came to doing it.  So I started reading Daniels' Running Formula as I've mentioned in previous posts (What do Deepak Chopra, Jack Daniels and Jack Canfield all have in common? and I'm going to rest) and I realized that I was overtraining; pushing my body too hard.  I thought that as long as I was eating incredibly well, getting more than enough rest and thinking positive thoughts that I could push my body as hard as I wanted to and I would become incredible faster than normal.  Well it turns out that plan didn't work so well.  I was getting tired, my foot started to feel stress-fracturey. (Meaning like I felt a potential stress fracture coming on.  How could I even know this? You may be asking.  Well I had a stress fracture in both feet two years ago from going to fast, too soon, without a strong enough base of training and before I even saw a doctor and he confirmed it I was sure it was a stress fracture, but anyways...) So I felt like that, started reading the book, which then shifted my running, training paradigm.  

I calculate that in order to get where I want to be I need to peak around May.  That gives me around 36 weeks for training.  Daniels recommends to split the training into 4 phases.  The first phase is a relatively easy phase where all you're doing is easy and long runs.  You start out at a certain amount of mileage that you feel comfortable doing, and then if the amount is feeling easy/manageable then every 3 weeks you can increase 1 mile onto your weekly total for every workout session you're doing.  If that doesn't make sense, read my post on For the Beginner, Beginner: How to Get Started. So I had been doing 8-12 miles daily and I knew that I could semi-comfortably do two workouts of 3 miles a piece 5 days a weeks with a six-miler on Saturday morning.  36 miles each week.  In 3 weeks I'll bump that up by a maximum of 10 miles, we'll see when we get there.

Now for all my runs I run at the same pace, for now, and that is the E pace of 7:38 per mile.  Based on my most recent time in the 5K of 17:38 I score about a 58 on Daniels' scoring system called VDOT.  He's got another page that then calculates according to the VDOT what the E pace (or Easy Pace) should be.  It also calculates what the tempo run pace should be, what the marathon pace should be, interval training pace for different distances and repetition training for different distances should be.  So I run 36 miles per week at 7:38 per mile.  I really want a GPS watch, but for now my system of MapMyRun.com with my good Timex watch is working fine--I just feel a little restricted that's all.  There's a little more as far as stretching and a circuit/plyometric/calisthenic workout, but I'll get to that tomorrow or something. Peace.