Training between Half Marathons

brentb71

This past weekend I ran my first ever half marathon at the Louisiana Marathon. It was an awesome race and I was very pleased with my time.

I have another half in 12 weeks. I don't want to regress back to the mileage of week 1 of a 12 week training program as my eventual goal is a marathon. I'm comfortable with running the 4 or 5 days, 25+ miles a week that I ran towards the end of the training program for the 1st half race. I guess my question is do I keep increasing my mileage 10% or stay about where I am and work on improving on my half marathon?

edit: I've only been running for 10 months and I do have a couple of 10k's scheduled before the next half.

iWaffle

I'd be curious to know as well. I haven't done a half yet. I was looking at doing one in the fist week of June. Like you said I'm doing 20 - 25 miles a week right now. I plan on just keeping it around this level and maybe increasing it when I get a couple months out away from the race.

HMVOL7409

Another bump. I've done a 1/2 and have been running over a year but I have a 1/2 in May one in August and maybe a 3rd in October. Be interested in hearing how to maintain mileage. However it may all change if I switch the October race to the full marathon.

czmmom

I ran my first half in October and I cut back some. The only thing I have changed is my long run. I cut that back to 6 miles. I am running another half in May, so we will see how I do. I figured with running 6 miles, I am 2 weeks to feeling comfortable for a 15k and 6-8 weeks from a half.

corys8646

when i'm between races, I will typically cut my mileage back some (not very much), but do 1-2 days a week of either speed or hill workouts. I think it's really what your preference is. I'd like to get faster over time, so I add those workouts in my routine. Some people are happy doing steady state runs.

I still run 5 days a week, but my weekly mileage might be in the 30 miles per week versus a peak of 50 per week when training for a marathon. What changes is type of workouts and intensity.

workout_junkee

I had the same situation last year. I scaled my long runs back to 6-8 miles and picked my training plan back up about 6 weeks out.

rnash1

Maintain your base, incorporate some speed workouts then ramp back up a few weeks before.

Lammerchops

Echoing rnash. The idea is to go back to the foundational runs, with your tempo days to increase your average speed. You don't want to continue to log high mileage right now because the idea is to create another peak for your next race.