Month: January 2020
Spring Training 2020
Posted on January 2nd, 2020 by John Armstrong
The Thursday track sessions this spring have been designed to fit in with our training schedules for London and Brighton marathons and for Paddock Wood half marathon. You can see the full schedules here.
To use the schedules, you should customize with a realistic target time. If you are running a first marathon, then you should normally base your target on a recent half marathon, assuming you are planning to commit to a similar number of training days each week. If you are targeting a PB then be ambitious, but realistic. If you decide you want to increase your training from 3 to 5 days a week (say), then do this gradually over the first few weeks of the schedule.
Our schedules contain a lot of practice races, designed around the events we like to run as a club. Most of these races are free to enter, but you might want to sign up now for the Fred Hughes 10 in St Albans and the Wokingham Half Marathon. They will both sell out pretty quickly, so get your skates on if you fancy doing either of these.
The other practice races will appear on your schedule if you choose to train on Saturdays. These include some cross country and lots of parkruns. Don’t run the parkruns hard every week, use them as a way to customize the schedule to how you are feeling. If you’re tired, give yourself a break. If you are full of beans, then go for it.
If you have a different target race in mind, or have different preferences for how to train, then use our schedules to tell you what will be happening on a Thursday and what races are coming up so that you can build your own schedule that fits in with the club. Our Thursday sessions would easily fit into a training plan for any distance from 5K up, but you might, for example, replace a Highgate run with some some hill sprints if your focus is on shorter distances.
Paddock Wood Half Marathon
Paddock Wood is an excellent half marathon for anyone new to half marathons or who is looking for a PB. It is a flat, fast course on roads. It is a one lap course with a relatively small field, so you there won’t be crowds of people getting in your way. We’ve also selected Paddock Wood as the perfect tune-up run for London marathon.
If you are worried about transport, then there is a direct train to Paddock Wood from Charing Cross arriving 28 minutes before the start, which is right by the train station. If there is demand, I’ll look into arranging alternative transport for those who want to get their earlier.
