What’s In Your Half Marathon Training Plan?

As you may have heard, I am planning on another half marathon! It’s early next year, and I’m a combination of terrified and excited. Best Damn Race Safety Harbor… here I come. Of course, with new goals comes new training. So let’s talk about the ingredients of my half marathon training plan!

Easy Runs

Easy runs are kind of my favorites. I love the party pace, where I run and chat and take pictures of cool things. These easy runs are so great and necessary, but I confess to relying on them a bit too heavily sometimes.

Speed Work

As you all know, I want to be faster but I hate speed work. Which, of course, is quite the conundrum. Sadly for me, you can’t have one without the other, so I’m committing to one day of speed work a week. My hope is that I can make myself do it enough that it become habit and gets a little easier. Since I don’t have access to a track and the treadmill is a bit painful for me, I’m going to use a Week 1 Couch To 5K workout, where I sprint the run intervals and recover during the walk intervals. If that works well, I can make adjustments from there.

Strength Training

Now that my work busy season is over, I can go ahead and spend more time in the gym. I’ve been doing at least one day a week, which isn’t a lot, but it’s better than nothing. However, I do notice improvement when my upper body and core is stronger, so this is definitely going to be an ingredient in my training plan. I hate making excuses, but there has been too much coordinating of schedules to make it happen. Although it means getting up at 4:30 to make it work, I have established a decent plan and will go from there.

Rest + Sleep

The good news is it’s the holiday season and streaming stations are in the process of launching over 100 new holiday movies. I have a new cozy blanket and an urge to be festive. I see lots of putting my feet up and enjoying in my future. The bad news is I really don’t care for down days from workouts, so active recovery will remain a part of my MO.

Nutrition

Somehow, I will find a way to build more protein into my diet. I’m really off cooking chicken right now, and we don’t eat much red meat in the house. Sigh. It’s good for me, for sure, but sometimes we don’t eat the fuels that are best for us. Quite frankly, I’d rather just hang out with a cheese board on the regular, but that’s probably not conducive to the best training cycle, so I will make the effort to lock in on the food. It’s only in my best interest.

What would you add to this half marathon training recipe?

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