The past week was my last week of "unstructured" maintenance running, where I spent my time just getting in miles with no specific pace target (and no official distance target other than aiming for ~40 mpw including a minimum 10-miler on Sundays). On one hand, it's nice not to be pinned down to a strict schedule that says tonight I must run this workout, tomorrow will be that, etc. I like the feeling of having the flexibility to move around a rest day or not take one if I don't feel like I need one (or take an extra one) without the sense that I've just made the rest of the week's running difficult. On the other hand, I find that I get a little antsy when I don't have a concrete goal, and it can be too easy to get slushy about soft goals such as "I just want to run x miles a week". When I have a goal, I need a framework to reach it.
For the races I've run over the last couple years, I have been using the marathon plan A from the 2nd edition of Daniels' Running Formula. (For about a week last year, I thought I might try the Elite plan; at the conclusion of that week, I laughed at my own audacity and rewrote my schedule following the A plan.) Unlike the schedule I picked out of an issue of Runner's World for my first marathon back in 2004 (don't knock the source -- it wasn't especially easy and it got me to 3:22), it doesn't provide day-by-day workouts, instead giving two quality workouts a week during different phases of buildup to the race; you fill in the rest of the mileage.
The quality workouts are tough (as they should be, I wouldn't expect to run sub-3:30 on all easy running). The workouts focus a great deal on improving running economy, with a lot of running at threshold and marathon race pace. I've had to be realistic and willing to listen to how I am responding and accept that I might have to lower the expectation a little. Sometimes, those threshold workouts were kicking my butt before I knew it and had to adjust real-time, so that I wouldn't flame out spectacularly but still reap some benefit of the effort. This gives my system a better chance at good recovery so that I can bounce back and nail the next workout. Naturally, I always try to head into a scheduled workout with the aim of completing it as written, but I have to allow for some leeway given my body's feedback. I don't want to overtrain, I don't want to burn out, and I don't want to get injured, but I'm going to push it as much as I can up to those boundaries so that I can have an honest shot at my goals.
Phase I went well this season, but I'm looking forward to putting some more rigor around my running. I'm looking forward to focusing not only on getting the miles in, but on making some of those miles really count toward improvement. I've enjoyed tallying up miles-per-week and miles-per-run, gathering heart rate and pace data to play with later (I'm a physical chemist, I like having data to plot), but there is even more enjoyment in filling in the schedule chart and hitting that week's training goals and every week seeing improvement. Every training cycle I have learned a little more about how Plan A should work and how I can make it work; I'm looking forward to using it to do even better this spring.
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