Hello All,
This past week my twitter running friend, @amandaJeberly (Go follow her!), asked me how I trained for Dopey and since it wasn’t as easy as linking to a training plan I thought I’d share it here.
Training For Dopey
- by Katherine P
For starters, I love Hal Higdon’s training plans, they are simple and usually just post a distance you should run each day. His Intermediate Half Marathon plan helped me complete my first half marathon all the way back in 2010 and his Intermediate I and Intermediate 2 marathon plans have helped me complete all 7 of my marathons to date. For all you Goofy runners out there, his Intermediate 2 plan is PERFECT since every weekend has back to back long runs where you double your Saturday mileage on Sundays.
Here are the reasons I like Hal Higdon’s plans:
- I’m not a big cross trainer so I don’t mind running 4-5 days a week
- The weekly mileage peaks at my breaking point (more than 50 miles a week and I start to fall apart)
- It’s pretty easy to swap around days without ruining the program (sometimes my Thursday run becomes my Friday run)
- Not a ton of other stuff to remember (speed work outs, what to run at the track, etc)
- I’ve never been a walk/run or Galloway runner
So, when starting my search for a Dopey Plan I had to take a look at Hal Higdon’s Dopey Training Plan to see what he recommended. This plan had more rest days that I was really looking for so I decided to frankenstein a plan of my own by combining it with his Intermediate 2 marathon plan.
NOTE: I am a fairly seasoned marathoner (the 2014 WDW Marathon was my 6th marathon) and feel comfortable doing this, I would not recommend this if you have not trained for a marathon before. The marathon is the most important piece to the Dopey puzzle since this is the toughest and longest distance. If I were you I’d follow Hal’s Dopey plan to a T.
The key to success when approaching any back to back race weekend is getting in back to back training runs (Sounds like a “Well, Duh!’ statement but you’d be surprised). If you don’t see this in the plan, DO NOT FOLLOW THE PLAN. If the plan conditions you to only do 1 long run with a rest day before and after, you are not setting yourself up for success. You need to learn how to run on fatigued legs.
So here’s the plan I created for myself using the Intermediate 2 marathon training plan:
