Congrats on your first half!
If you just completed one you don't need to start over again. I would keep a solid distance until your half in December. You could always start in the middle of Hal's training plan if you want to follow a plan. I would probably keep a long run between 8-12 miles. Your friend depending on when in October could just repeat the last few weeks of the plan? Have a drop down week (this week) and rebuild?

I am sure others have better advice ha

Maybe find a full marathon plan and start halway in that? Best way to prepare for a half is to train for a full I say.

Rewind your half plan and start it however many weeks out til your 10k. With you being so new to running, I wouldn't recommend diving into a full marathon plan since they can peak at 45+MPW (and I doubt you're anywhere near there currently). At a minimum, just continue to build your base with the slow and easy miles since you're running a 2:40 HM. Work on increasing your MPW!

Maybe find a full marathon plan and start halway in that? Best way to prepare for a half is to train for a full I say.

I don't think a marathon plan for a 10K is the way to go....

At a minimum, just continue to build your base with the slow and easy miles since you're running a 2:40 HM. Work on increasing your MPW!

I would do that.

Congrats on your first half! I don't really have any advice because I'm pretty much in the same boat as you. Nothing to train for and it's bumming me out a bit, I gotta say! I think I'm going to do a half three weeks from now and besides that I'm just going to try to PR on the shorter distances! If you have any desire to run longer than 13.1 you could also start picking out a early spring marathon which would give you a ton of time to train!

Congrats on your first HM!

There are couple of ways of handling this:

First, if you have a specifc race date in mind for the half (and it seems you do), you could just pick up the training at the appropriate point, working backwards from the race date and do that.

But the thing I'd recommend is this: you already have the distance training in, so just keep repeating the last six weeks leading up to the half-marathon with the taper. What you really want to do is keep the long-distance conditioning up and the physical and mental stamina associated with the endurance distance of the half-marathon. But you still want to vary the distance to allow you muscles and your aerobic system to develop and maintain what you've accomplished.

BTW, you are likely to see improvement both because of continued training and because the weather might get even more ideal.

I had to sort this out for myself last year when I ran my first three marathons (ever) in November, February and April. Moreover, I didn't want to "start over" from April to November of this year between two marathons. So every few weeks, until I could back-calculate the training schedule into my "maintenance mileage", I ran two HMs to keep my edge in May and June before racing season here dropped off. I would also run a slow training run of between 15 and 20 miles every few weeks to keep the training along with shorter runs of 45-60 minutes at least twice during the week just to keep to some routine schedule in place.

BTW, it worked.

My HM times (not the split time in the full marathon) have dropped from 2:13:45 in my first HM in March down to 2:01:56 last weekend. My HMs have corresponded with mid-distance speed training runs for my next series of marathons.

I went through the exact same thing in 2012... I went from C25K through 10K and up to HM within 6 months of starting running always with a written out plan ahead of me.

I literally was in the shower in my hotel room after the first HM when the thought occurred to me "now what?"

The real answer is - whatever you want!

You've gotten from the couch to the HM and done it well (my first HM was 2:46, so 2:40 sounds just fine to me:)

What I did at the recommendation of others was to find another goal race a couple of months later and continue with the HM training. I scheduled one for myself 10 weeks after the first and went back into the Hal Higdon HM training plan that I had just used... running about 2/3 of the peak mileage each week until the plan caught up with me and then continuing through the rest of the cycle.

That second race in the fall of 2012 was my best-trained race, and is still my PR nearly two years and 5 more HMs later. I cut 16 minutes off my time from 10 weeks earlier.

One thing I wouldn't recommend is the idea of transitioning right to a full marathon training plan. I thought about it after that second HM and on the advice of runners I respect and trust, I shelved it for nearly two years.

Now this year, after another two years of running, I am finally training for my first full and I feel like I JUST have enough experience and enough of a running base to make a go of it.

Good luck in whatever you do!

Ted