Couch to 10 Miler Plan

Due to my surgery at the end of June, I went 28 straight days without running. This doesn’t include the week leading up to my surgery that I didn’t run my normal schedule. When I started back on July 24^th, I walk/ran 1.5 miles. At this point, I decided that I needed to come up with a strategy to get back to where I was before my appendicitis. My company is a sponsor of the Virginia 10 Miler, which takes place in Lynchburg. I ran in the race last year and really enjoyed the experience. My company pays the majority of the entry fee for its employees, so it made a good target race for several reasons.

I knew I was going to have to be dedicated, in order to be ready to run a 10 mile race at the end of September. I sat down and planned out all my runs for the 9 weeks leading up to the race. To limit my soreness and to reduce injury, I concentrated on three areas; distance of each run, distance of longest run for each week, the weekly distance total. I wanted to be sure to slow step up each of these categories as the weeks progressed, but not a rate that could cause me a setback.

I am a dork and I like spreadsheets. So, of course I had to make one for my 9 week running plan. Here my final plan. All numbers (minus the percentage) are mileage totals for each day, as well as weekly total mileage. I used the weekly total distance % change  to help verify I wasn’t upping my total mileage too much.

Here is my actual mileage chart so far. Since I have been feeling good during most of my runs, I let myself add a little more distance with each run. But I limit it to only a ½ mile extra.