After almost two months of my no-plan-training-plan, I must say I’m very excited to be starting a regimented plan again. I know both my body and my mind needed the break as I was pretty burned out after an up and down year of racing. It also gave me the chance to get a whole lot of spinning and strength stuff in that I sometimes let slip when I’m running more often. Still, my motivation was pretty low so I just wasn’t getting out there and running nearly as much as I would have liked, so now it’s time to change that.

I’ll have my race calendar up soon, but my target spring race is the Virginia Beach Half Marathon that is part of the Shamrock Marathon weekend. It’s also the site of an Oiselle team meet-up, so I’m super pumped to get to fly fast with a bunch of my fellow birds!

I’m back to training on my own without a coach, so as usual I’ve been doing obsessive research into the best possible training plans for me for this race. I settled on my old favorite – the Hal Higdon Advanced Half plan. I’m a big fan of Hal’s plans and have had success with them in the past.

While I have a goal of getting in as many of the planned workouts as possible, I also want to make sure I stay flexible. By that I mean a few things including being smart and knowing when my body might need a break as well as not missing out on group workouts/runs because it’s not the exact mileage I have on tap for the day.

In addition to my runs and strength training built into the plan, I’ll be spinning at Revolve when I can fit it in, stretching A LOT and becoming good friends with my foam roller!

I don’t have a goal time for the race yet, but I do have a PR in mind knowing it’s a very flat course. After I have a few more weeks of training under my belt I’ll have an update for you on my race goals.

Have you used the Hal Higdon plans before? How’d it work out for you? What other training plans do you like?