Do you use a HR monitor or do you go off RPE?

thanks for the feedback, i will try to incorporate some of those sets. what do you not like about the schedule? i used a jack daniels plan last fall and it was generally setup this way, though i believe it had 6 runs/week. from my perspective i am getting a good combination of rest days, easy miles, and quality work.

I've trained and raced a lot of marathons, and I've trained others to as well. I've found that for people running low mileage, like you, that there's more benefit to be gained by doing continuous quality than by hitting the track. You've got to train your legs to be ready to pound for 26 miles and pounding for 800m then stopping and doing it repeatedly isn't your best bang for the buck when only running 40-50 miles weekly.

If I were training someone who wanted to do 5 runs a week I'd set it up a bit differently. I understand you probably have your Saturday/Sunday set up the way you do because you have free time. So in that case what I'd do is a bit different than what you're doing.

I'd do a quality day on Wednesday, typically I'd try and put this one in the threshold range. Always as much continuous as makes sense. Warm up and do 3 sets of 2 miles, or 2 sets of 3 miles, or a continuous 6-8 miles easing a bit off the pace you'd do a 3 mile threshold at. Every few weeks do 1000s at 5k pace instead. Saturday's I'd probably alternate between 400 meter repeats (on the road, up to 10 with full recovery) and running close to CURRENT marathon effort or slightly slower. On weeks with a longer long run do the 400s, on weeks with a shorter long run do the marathon effort.

Add in recovery runs around there, doing strides at the end of them. It would also be good to make that Wednesday one as long as possible in terms of mileage. If you can get the warm up and cool down to make it 12 miles, that's awesome. Also the reason I put it on Wednesday is after 2 quality days in a row you need a bit of recovery.

Good luck with CIM, I've done it 7 times and set my all time best there. Great race.

Do you use a HR monitor or do you go off RPE?

Favorite speed workouts (2 mile WU and 2 mile CD for A and B):

A. 10 x 1000m (threshold pace, rest is at a slower pace to return to Zone 2 or comfortable speaking)
B. 12 x 400m (above threshold pace, rest is same as above)
C. Fartlek where I intermittently do 4-5 mile repeats at 5K pace

I don't think you need a large number of diverse track workouts, and prefer to have A and B so that I can see my paces improving and/or my rest times shortening.

I like you easy, speed, easy, tempo, long plan. Agree with strides after easy workouts. If not recovered from speed, tempo, or long then stretch instead of easy run.

Marklemcd, I went to your blog. Your last post in January says your are injured. Did you overcome the injury? If so how?