A plan to get fit by the fall
Or, as close to that as possible 😉
The cold temperatures are still here — at night, we’re still getting down into the twenties sometimes — but last week’s snow has long since melted away, and with it the excuse I was using to lounge around the house in my sweatpants, lazily throwing logs on the fire throughout the day as I waited for little T to come back inside after hours of playing out in the white, powdery stuff.
And so, the unexpected extension to our winter holiday break is now over, which of course means… it’s time to get back to my New Year’s resolutions again, the fitness routines I’d laid to the side while we all had fun in our winter wonderland.
(Oh, how lovely it’s been to rest and do nothing afterwards… 😊 )
Just before the start of the year, I was talking with my brother-in-law, who told me he’s interested in running a half marathon. He’ll turn fifty-five this year, it’s something he’s never done, and it’s something he’d like to do before he waits too long and his knees won’t let him.
So he asked me to put together a training plan for him, with the tentative target date of running a half sometime in mid-November — ideally, one he and I could run together. (I thought about it for a second and replied, “you’ve come to the right place.”)
There’s just one catch: he’s not a runner at all. He bikes fairly regularly out in the mountains near his home in Northern California, and works out more-or-less consistently to strength train. But he hasn’t run more than a mile or so in a long, long time.
Which means he needs a plan that won’t assume he’s already running 15 miles a week, or anything like that — he needs one that starts quite literally from square one.
Of the training plans I’ve put together for us over the past couple of years, my longest is 20 weeks — but, because we chose November as our date to shoot for, we have a lot more than twenty weeks in which to train. In fact, we have just over 43 weeks between now and then — plenty of time for him to get ready, I think.
Knowing that, and knowing he’ll need to start with reasonably short distances at first and low mileage numbers for those early weeks, here’s how I’m thinking he should approach his training — and how you might too, if you’re looking to do the same thing:
So, where to start?
Slowly. If you’ve never run before, it can be intimidating. Back when I was in my twenties, I started by running around a park near my apartment, along a trail that was just shy of two miles long if you ran the whole way around.
At first, I never could make it the whole way around; the first time I did, I felt amazing — I hadn’t run that far in years (maybe ever!). So, these first few weeks, we’ll do a combination of walking and running:
Weeks 1-2
On 3 days during the week, walk or run 1/2 mile to 1 mile
Space out your running days so you run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (or Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday)
Mix the walking/running however feels right to you; don’t be afraid to challenge yourself to run a little further each time out