What Next

It has been a week and a half since finishing the Broad Street Run. Since the beginning of the year my sights have been set on running that 10 miles through the city of brotherly love, and while I had abandoned the structured training plan, I was still running with a specific purpose.

Now it is over.

My next big race will be the Philadelphia Distance Run, but I will not be training specifically for that one. It falls into my training for the Philadelphia Marathon, the race I have been looking forward to since last year.

It is never too early to begin preparation for a marathon, but it is too far out to start a training program. So what to do?

Outline my mileage for the next three months.

I want to gradually increase my mileage and improve my fitness so that I can train hard for the marathon. I have outline the number of miles I will be running each week, and even broke them down into individual runs. I will gradually increase the weekly mileage, with a cutback week every month.

This outline brings me up to the first full week in August, which will begin my training program for the marathon. By that time I will be running 20-30 miles per week, and hopefully doing so comfortably.

A week or two before I come up with a training program, I will find a 5k or hopefully a 10k race that I can use to gauge my running fitness. This will help me develop a 16-week training plan that I will be following.

I want my first marathon to be a strong one, and I think this plan will help a lot with that. I may waver from it a bit, but that is fine. If I follow the overall outline I should be able to improve and train hard for the marathon.

I am still excited to run.