Beating Alex in the Spring Half Marathon

Fast Alex

My goal for the winter is simple, get fast enough to beat Alex in the spring half marathon!  This could be the BMO Vancouver Marathon if we end up doing it, or maybe something around Edmonton like the Police Man's half.

The Background Story

Pace Times for Vancouver, Edmonton Half Marathons and the Fall Classic 10 Miler for 2011/12

Alex is basically the running champ of our half marathon crew.  Of those we run with regularly KK is the only one who can get close to his half marathon times and he is still around 3 minutes ahead of her.  As you can see from the graph above, Alex's times are consistently lower, and slowly but steadily improving to boot.  Rich's times are quite a bit higher but as of late are dropping fairly quickly, he has definitely seen some major improvements this year.  My usual training trend is to train fairly consistently and vigorously in the spring for the Vancouver marathon, lay off a little for the Edmonton, then train harder for the Fall Classic to try to make up for the disappointing Edmonton time.  The closest I've ever gotten to Alex's time was the Vancouver half this year, where I was 10 minutes slower.  Losing that 10 minutes (and maybe more if Alex picks up his game and follows the trend) is going to require more than the usual training plan/pattern.  Which is why I have...

The New Plan

First, I am going to ramp up my mileage.  I first read Hadd's Approach to Distance Running on Chuckie V's blog, and it sounded like a good theory.  Basically, it suggested I needed to run quite a bit more at easy heart rates to push up my lactic threshold and learn to run fast at a low heart rate.  To that end, I am going to try to ramp my training up from 20 miles this week to 50 miles a week by Christmas (an increase of 10% a week). I'm going to try to run most of it at an easy pace, with some faster runs to add a little speed.  Then, in the new year I'm going to switch to Hal Higdon's advanced program.  I've done the intermediate program a couple of times and it is always pretty solid, but hopefully the advanced program will help me take it to another level.  This plan features 6 days or running a week with hill running AND speed work, how can it fail?