I’m my own coach, and this is about my process of getting and adjusting training plans. It’s loosely based on the process described in You (Only Faster)*, although I’ve started with Hal Higdon plans as opposed to the 5 day/week plans in You.

My main adjustments are:

My long run day is Friday
I’ve found that I have no motivation after working the week and waking up in a house that I don’t have to leave at the buttcrack of dawn. I have a wife, I have kids, and Saturday and Sunday mornings are spent with them. This usually means moving the Saturday long run to a Friday rest day, sometimes it means moving more stuff around.
Taper Week adjustments
Since not all races happen on Sunday and since I usually have 1-2 days extra, I have to adjust taper week. I stick to the same idea of the plan, usually adding to Monday and Tuesday
Adjusting for things to avoid
With my history of injuries and because I’m old and overweight, I do not schedule hard days adjacent to long days or other hard days. My normal “excersizing” progression is hills**, easy, speedwork, easy, distance (usually long-slow, but sometimes I mix in a fast-finish week). I generally try to keep to this, even if it isn’t specifically called for in the plan.

Notes:

* one of these days, I am going to use Greg McMillan’s half-marathon plan. The first long runs in the plan are 14-16 miles, though, and I’m just not ready for that!

** I don’t do hills the same way as what most coaches indicate. I use a route that is largely uphill for the first half. I work in downtown Cincinnati, so my ‘hill run’ is northbound up Eggleston Avenue to Gilbert to Eden Park Drive and then crossing over from Eden Park Drive/Victory Parkway to Gilbert Avenue . Starting and ending at Pete Rose Way and Eggleston Avenue, I’ve found that crossing over Kemper Road is 4.5 miles, crossing at McMillan Road is around 5.5 miles, crossing over Taft Road is around 6 miles, and crossing over MLK Drive is 7 miles.

Recordkeeping

My main planning record is a Google Spreadsheet that looks something like this:

Running Planning and Tracking Spreadsheet

This gives me some places to make notes (the bright cyan box is when I got new shoes!) and it holds notes (which I can also leave as comments). I also use colors – the snot green is completed weeks, and I tend to use yellow for important things as well, like in the below.

This is it in a nutshell, and it isn’t perfect (for example, I haven’t figured out what to do on those days where I want to run the NKU XC series but also run 4, 5, or 6 miles).

Stats So Far

450 miles run this year
69 hours, 44 minutes spent running
Average pace of 9:18 minutes per mile