The hard weekends/easy weekdays may be the perfect fit for the weekend warrior, making sure their endurance is up to snuff for a long distance race.įor traditional runners, the imbalance may lead to lower confidence of abilities and speed. My first thought would be to add more pace or tempo miles mid-week periodically, but I think that would tip the scale to too many hard miles. I met my goal with this program, but I still don’t know how I feel about it. With only 10 pace runs in the 18 weeks and very slow long runs, the focus was on endurance.
This plan physically prepared me to run my goal pace, but due to the nature and timing of the workouts, it didn’t develop in me a lot of confidence that I could go my goal pace.
Hal Higdon Intermediate 1 Marathon Training Review A tempo run with a long warm-up and cool-down would have been an excellent hard Wednesday workout, but takes away from the easy miles necessary for any training plan. Having two hard workouts on the weekends pushed all the easy days together midweek. Those could be done on cut-back weeks, but that defeats active recovery. The ability to do other long run variations, like mid-run pace miles or fast finishes would benefit runners. But, you don’t need to practice it for every single long run. On Sunday, I was always practicing on tired legs.ĭon’t get me wrong, practicing on tired legs is important. On Saturday, I reserved myself for Sunday. The back-to-back hard workouts (pace runs followed by long runs) meant I never gave 100% mentally or physically on either day. You could power-up this plan by aggressively cross-training or use it as a day for active recovery, like I did. I used the cross-training day as a day to leisurely bike and do extra stretching or yoga. The two twenty-mile runs gains you a lot of confidence in your endurance and an opportunity to experiment with nutrition. The program is well-organized with 5 days of running, taking advantage of both weekend days. To learn about the basics of the training plan, check out the overview here. I used this plan for my 3rd marathon and improved my time by 12 minutes. Hal Higdon presents the Intermediate 1 program for free on his website. This Hal Higdon’s Intermediate 1 Marathon Training Review covers what works great in the plan and what may not work well, so you can choose your next training plan wisely.
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