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That is incredibly helpful, thank you. I have sort of started following this though am only on week 2: http://cdn.running.competitor.com/files/2012/11/46_nat_r1.pdf
I was considering doing the to and from work runs in place of the tues-weds-thurs runs but that would probably make it difficult for me to do any kind of 'quality' running. There would be lots of miles but all very slow.
I am going to a festival in North Wales this weekend where the forecast is for rain and 50mph winds so that may result in a cut to my Saturday mileage...
tricitybendix-
Ha, right. Here's me who has only ever done a slow half marathon giving advice to someone on a ultra plan.
But I'll try anyway! That plan follows the typical good advice for quality/quantity. There's an intervals run (mixed with the hilly runs) on a Wednesday. There's a long run (Saturday) and a tempo-ish run on a Sunday, and the rest is easy and optional easy runs (plus some cross training and core work).
Those plans are great if you can fit them straight into your schedule, but as you're finding out they don't often do that. I took my plan (an intermediate marathon plan from the bupa website) and rejigged it to fit my schedule as I work from home a couple of days a week, work in the office two days a week and have school drop-off/collections to fit in too, plus I didn't want to lose so much family time at the weekends.
Looking at that plan the key things seem to be:
- A long run followed the next day by a hour tempo-ish run
- An easy run followed next day by a hilly run or hill intervals, followed next day by another easy run. These are separated from the long and tempo runs.
As long as you keep these key features then you should be able to rejig it to fit your schedule.
The long run has to remain a single long run, splitting it up between commute in and commute home won't have the same training effect as it won't have you running on the right level of fatigued legs.
The problem with Tue/Wed/Thu for your easy/hilly/easy runs is that I guess it's hard to make a Wednesday commute hilly, or do hill repeats, so, what about moving the whole plan 4 days forward (i.e. the long run on Saturday you now do on a Tuesday):-
- Tue: Long run (extend your commute into work or home from work), reward yourself with the train/bus/tube/boris-bike the other way. Can be an early start but extending my commute into a HM really works for me (once a month or so)
- Wed: 1 hour medium effort run (in to work, extend your commute if required, or recovery jog the remaining distance after the hour is up if it's longer than an hour), easy run home
- Thu: easy run in, possibly easy run home if you're up to it or get public transport home
- Fri: 45-60 min easy run
- Sat: Hilly run or hill repeats (this was Wednesday)
- Sun: 1:15 to 1:30 easy plus core
- Mon: off or easy swim/jog
Will take some rejigging near the end of the 16 week plan in order to taper correctly, but as long as you're only adding easy runs as extra runs you should be fine (assuming your legs/mind can take it).
A 20+mile long run on the way in or home from work may take a bit of willpower (as opposed to having the whole of a Saturday to do it) but if you can do it and shift the plan by 4 days then it leaves you loads of nice recovery time over the weekend as you'll just have two shortish (in ultra terms) runs to do on Saturday and Sunday.
- A long run followed the next day by a hour tempo-ish run
Greenbank
No reason, just be careful building up too fast. And it does get a bit easier (if you keep it easy) otherwise it doesn't get easier, you just get faster. (But if you want to get faster faster then you need to do more stuff easier, hopefully you'll see what I mean...)
I do my 12km commute once or twice a week, but at a lovely slow "easy run" pace (which starts off feeling easy but eventually feels vaguely uncomfortable).
The general rule of thumb is not to add more than 10% distance a week, and the vast majority of your miles are 'easy' runs (at aforementioned slow/shuffling pace).
Obviously you need some sort of base to start on (as 110% of nothing is nothing) but if you're doing 30k a week (if you've done 2 x 12k in a day I assume you're happy with at least 30k a week) then 10% a week adds up very quickly (starting with 30k/week you'd be at 200km/week in 20 weeks at a 10% increase a week). Don't push it too early otherwise you'll risk injury.
The pace calculators here: https://www.mcmillanrunning.com/ are great. I put in my recent 26:16 parkrun and it tells me I should be doing easy runs at 5:59-6:33/km and long runs at 6:00-6:47/km. I'm more than happy with this as it is very achieveable, if anything it feels too slow, but it's doing me good. My commute in today (just shy of 12km) was at 6:17/km and my main goal was keeping my HR down rather than pushing harder and going for a faster time. I am seeing my times go down, but also my HRavg is going down, so I'm getting fitter/more-efficient.
I do two 'quality' runs a week:
One 'long run' a week
The rest is 'quantity' at an easy pace, and it surprised me just how easy this pace is. No bonus points for pushing faster as that would just adversley affect my long or quality runs. These are the runs you want to add to if you want to bulk up your week, don't be tempted to add anything else that's fast.
If in doubt post your plan and let someone far more experienced/qualified than me comment on it. Doing so certainly helped me.