Before the London Marathon I was really looking forward to not running to a plan, just going out and running by feel and not worrying about time, speed, distance… well I was wrong about that. If I don’t have a plan I don’t quite know what to do with myself and I end up not going out at all. If I have to think about what I want to do, I really struggle to decide that I want to run at all. A plan was needed. When we signed up for the Disneyland Super Heroes Marathon weekend in November I looked for the training plan for that and then checked whether there was one for the Disneyland Paris half, too.

We decided that the Jeff Galloway plans had got us to Dopey and through London so we weren’t about to go fix something that wasn’t broken. The plans have worked well for us and I am still convinced that the run/walk intervals are what keeps my motivation up because it means I can actually do a pretty decent distance and don’t feel like a failure all the time. Anyway, I couldn’t find a plan for the Disneyland Paris Half so we used the November  run one and adapted the timings.

The plan we have finally come up with is an amalgamation of the Infinity Gauntlet Challenge plan, the improvers half marathon plan and a Runners World 10km training plan which we both liked the look of. Then we added in some specific yoga sessions – we usually do a little bit every day but I am certainly good at avoiding the strength yoga so that is now timetabled and on our non running weekend day we’ll try and do at least an hour, although not necessarily in one go.

So May looks like this:

As you can see we are at the end of week 1 of the plan. You’ll also see that the weekend runs are listed on Saturdays but that’s not set – it just means a weekend run for now. For example today we are not running but are instead planning to go to Bolton Abbey to run our RunDisney Shorts first virtual run there. Later on in the programme we add some back to back days so that’s when it all becomes a little less flexible.

June looks like this:

There are different types of sessions – hills every two weeks (although many of our routes include a good number of hills/slopes anyway so the hill sessions are the serious hills), 45 minutes with Magic Mile and/or with a section at race pace, form strides, longer runs with 1 minute surges and 800 metre interval speed training. I’m quite excited to see how this pans out and how much of a difference this will make to our half marathon time in autumn. I do want to go a bit faster (we set a new PB at the London Marathon of 2.48 ish I think although I’d have to check the exact time) and ultimately I’d like to get close to 2.30 but I’m also really interested to see how I feel and whether I can get through a half marathon without having to walk loads towards the end.

I’ll share the rest of the plan as we progress through it and keep you posted on how we are doing.

Anyway, happy running and just a warning – virtual Disney run tomorrow so the next blog is likely to be full of silliness!