Due to a knee injury, I had to drop my plan to run a Christmas Half Marathon. But I didn’t loose all the improvements in my running so put together a kind of maintenance half marathon program. I started with the Hanson Brother’s “Just Finish” Plan, but added a few weeks here and there to make the increases in long run mileage more gradual. Because this new plan will take me through winter to February, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to complete if we have too much snow, but I’ll keep you posted on any updates/changes to my plan.
Hanson Brother’s Half Marathon Plan
Modified ‘Just Finish’ Plan
The first thing I changed was mileage to kilometers. Because of my knee injury, I really wanted any big changes in mileage to be gradual, so added weeks to smooth out the increases in the long runs (shaded gray). So I turned the Hanson Brother’s 18-week plan into 24-weeks. No speed work or tempo runs – all are just easy ‘maintenance’ runs.
Cross Training
Because of my knee injury, I’ll be adding a lot more bodyweight workouts during the week, especially working on the muscles around the knee. I’ll be adding specific exercises to strengthen the hamstrings, core/ab workouts, weighted arm workouts, and lots of cycling.
Once winter arrives, I will try and continue running but if I can’t, might just try to do hiking through the snow. But for those times I can’t run/hike outside, I will use weighted jumprope workouts to keep my running endurance up.
Back to Nepal in January
But sometime in January I will hopefully return to my rural mountain village in Nepal. Once I get there, the plan might need to be adjusted until I can get acclimated to the steep rocky mountain roads. No matter what, I’ll be excited to be back. Then we’ll start looking at preparing for a short trail race. Yippie!!!
Zero to Ultra 