Change of Attack

Originally when I started thinking about training for Sarasota I thought I would move the schedule in Pfitz back one day so that our long runs would be on Saturdays which would give us Saturday nights free and then Sunday's free to go watch the Bears. However, this poses two problems :

• We play volleyball on Monday nights. At the start of the schedule there are several LT runs on on the first day of the week,which if switched would be Mondays, which would make volleyball pretty tough. Originally I was thinking that I could get up early on Mondays and run in the city and then be fine for volleyball in the pm. So far this season volleyball has been really fun and our team has been playing really well (even though we have lost ALL the games....we have been playing well....seriously!) and I don't want to screw up my play by being exhausted. Plus I know that it's going to be very hard to get up and run early and so the runs would end up being pushed to after volleyball which would just make those LT miles that much more fun.
  
• If we do our long runs on Saturday that's probably only one day a week that we'll be doing runs in the city and although I love running at Fermilab in the winter because the roads are all plowed and there is very little traffic making it ideal to get runs in, it's so not as cool as running in Chicago.
  

SO....the plan is to do our weekly runs at Fermilab after work. Then of course the Saturday/Sunday runs in Chicago. This benefits us in many ways because we don't have to get up at 5am to get to work by 6 to be able to leave by 2 to bypass traffic. We can get to work at 9 and then run at 5pm here and then drive home aruond 6:30 or 7 and still bypass traffic and be slighly more normal than needing to be in bed AND asleep by 9pm. This will also work great for the LT runs because it's so flat here and there are no traffic lights to dodge AND like I said about they will plow all the roads here so there won't be any slowing down to account for ice.

The official training program starts next week. (yikes!) To get ready for that we are doing do run on each day that we have to run next week and we are going to take a mile off each run. So the plan for this week is :

Tue : 7 miles
Thur : 8 miles
Sat : 4 miles
Sun :12 miles

Next week then is

Tue : 8mi w/10x100m
Thur : 9mi General Aerobic
Saturday : 5 mile Recovery
Sunday : 13 mile M-Long Run

We'll see how this works for the first few weeks. Given that it's winter and it's Chicago runs might have to be flip flopped to account for weather/snow storms etc. I am excited that this training plan is only 12 weeks. It will be much harder than the 18 week program because it's way more condensed BUT it's only 12 weeks thatI have to stay focused AND that means that my vacation is only 12 weeks away. Nice!