Made it to half way

Photo by morgan sarkissian on Unsplash

Well, I'm now officially halfway through my training, which I'm really chuffed with on the one hand, and slightly anxious about on the other. 

Looking at the weeks ahead, training seems to really ramp up the running durations. Now I've been sceptical about whether I could last the prescribed number of minutes before and have been pleasantly surprised, but before I was increasing in increments of 1 or 2 minutes.  I'm about to embark on the next 6 weeks of training, and I'm noticing increasing increments of 5, 10, and even 20 minutes. Week 10, for example looks like this: 

Day 1: Run 20, Walk 2, Run 20

Day 2: Run 25

Day 3: Run 40

...which, at this moment, looks a bit intimidating. 

Some Encouragement from the DCCT

It's Week 5, which I am relieved to discover is an "easy" week in my training plan. This means a couple of sessions of running just for 3 minutes at a time again. The week looks like this:

Run 3 walk 2 x 6
Run 3 walk 2 x 5
Run 5 walk 3 x 4

Apparently its good to have a few "easy" weeks of training here and there because it allows further recovery whilst keeping to a consistent routine. This is a better approach than just increasing the training each week as it reduces the likelihood of injury.

I was also pleasantly surprised to receive a training plan yesterday from the Derby 10k organisers, which I wasn't expecting. This is a lot more detailed than the plan I'm currently following (it's 46 pages long!), but it makes for some very interesting reading. At present, I'm nearly half way through a 12 week couch to 10k running plan that I found online, which I'm managing ok with so far. The DCCT training plan is a 24 week plan that takes me from this week right up to race day. According to this plan, 24 weeks is the optimal training time for racing, particularly if you're new to running or are a couch potato embarking on a new exercise programme (which is good because I won't feel so bad if I don't manage it in 12 then!)