I realized this morning that I haven’t talked about my training plan for the NY Marathon in quite a while. Since I’m now in the final phase of the plan, I thought it would be a good time to catch you all upon on what I’m doing.
As you may or may not recall, I’m using the Level 1 plan from Brain Training for Runners by Matt Fitzgerald. Although I have done a couple of marathons before, I chose the easiest plan rather than the Level 2 or 3 plan for a couple of reasons: I wanted to limit my mileage a bit because of the plantar fasciitis problems I had earlier in the year, and also because even though I’m not a novice marathoner, it’s been quite a long time since I’ve run one.
Right now, I’m in week 17/24 of the plan - the first week of the “Peak Phase”. The training objectives for the peak phase are to:
Achieve peak fatigue resistance and efficiency and marathon pace; adapt and recover for peak race day.
There are three key workouts in each week: intervals; a tempo run at half-marathon pace, and a long run, sometimes at base pace, and sometimes partially at marathon or half-marathon pace. There’s also a fourth running workout - a base pace run of varying distances, depending on the week, and 1 optional cross-training workout each week.
So far, I’ve liked the plan quite a bit. It’s been challenging, but most weeks I’ve felt pretty good, probably because the total distances each week haven’t been so much that I’ve been left exhausted. But, as the title of this post indicates, this phase is the hard part - the long run distances and total mileage each week increase until I get to the two-week taper at the end. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Hope everyone’s training is going well.
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Sounds like a very level headed plan for your upcoming NY Marathon! Smart to consider your mileage based on your previous plantar fasciitis problems. The most important run of the week is the Long Run, everything else is gravy!
Sounds a bit like the Run Less Run Faster plan I had except without having cross training built in week to week. I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one getting a bit tired!
@robinson52 - Thanks, and I think you’re right about the long runs.
@Terri - The plans are very similar in a lot of respects. I used the run less, run faster plan last year for a half and liked it quite a bit.