The Road To 50 Starts…

This is the first week of our 50 training plan.   50K, 50M, take your pick.   We’ll be possibly over training for a 50k and honestly possibly under training for a 50M.   But at the end of this particular road is just a 50K on November 18th so I’d rather be extra ready for it than not ready enough.

Our first long run tomorrow I’ll be doing solo because Bunny will elsewhere #sadface and Eric who has decided to run with us will be also elsewhere #sadface.

On this training plan which is of my own personal devising the first long run is a 20K with a 10k the day before. I ran the 10K this morning on trails and thanks to it being 30 degrees cooler this morning than it was on Thursday afternoon I didn’t end it feeling like I was dying.

The RunSalty 50 Plan is based on other published plans I’ve seen and books I’ve read but set up to fit my schedule of STWTS with MF rest/core/cross train days.    W is almost always a 6K, just a shake out run plus some core/cross training work.   Tu is usually something complicated like a pyramid or threshholds or intervals.  Th tends to have longer slower runs with hills and the like.

One weekend a month our Su long run starts at midnight.

One weekday a month we have a morning and evening run, usually for a total of 10k-15k between the two.

One week a month is a recovery week with mileage of around 25-27 miles max.

Mileage is set to increase 8-10% a week over the 4.5 month plan with the last .5 (two weeks) being a taper and the last long run being a marathon.   The longest run happens a week or two prior to that.

All runs are mileage based and heart rate zone targeted with most runs falling on HR Zone 2.

Total mileage over the 14 weeks including the 50K race is right at 800 miles.

I don’t believe there’s anything basically egregious about it even though I don’t even play a coach or trainer on T.V.   I’ve poured over lots of training plans for marathons, 50K’s, 50M’s, 100K’s and 100M’s and other than making things fit our needs (4 month training with 2 week taper after).

One of the bad things about Garmin is there is no way to share, download, copy or otherwise make sure multiple runners have the same schedule.  At least out of the box but Eric found a java based tool that can take a CSV file saved out of Excel and create both the runs and schedule them.  By piping the output into all of our Garmin Connect accounts I was able to somewhat easily create the same schedule for all of us with the same workouts.   And far faster and less prone to human error than trying to manually create the plans on all of our schedules.

Here’s a Google Sheets copy of the export file that should make it semi easy to figure out what each work out is.

Here’s an example of the first 3 weeks in Garmin.  I gave all the workouts a 50P prefix to their names so I know what they are and to avoid potentially stomping on any existing workouts.