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 24th,
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.
