Whoops

I’m awesome. Several months ago, when I was planning out my running and racing schedule for the future, I examined several 50K training schedules before selecting one that looked pretty good to me. On a piece of paper, I sketched down the back-to-back Saturday and Sunday distances for the plan, figuring out how they’d work with various races I had in mind besides Devil’s Lake, and I was happy with things.

A few weeks ago, I went looking for the site, to examine more of the details, and I couldn’t find it. Rather, I couldn’t find anything that matched the distances I’d written down. Finally, I decided that whatever plan I’d found must have had the page changed slightly, or else it was gone. I was relieved that I had the written copy, and I decided to just figure out the midweek runs based on a similar plan I found. Not ideal, but workable.

This morning, I found the original plan, purely by chance. The reason I couldn’t find it before? It’s not a 50K training plan. It’s a plan to train for a 50 mile race. I guess I’d have been really, really prepared for Devil’s Lake! On the other hand, there does exist the phenomenon of overtraining, and the whole reason I’m doing a 50K as my first ultra is to allow my body time to accustom itself to higher mileage. Maybe it should have seemed strange to me to have planned for myself seven training runs of twenty miles or more, but I clearly am a genius who is above such earthly logic.

Now, to try to patch together a training plan that encompasses what I liked about this one and still coordinates nicely with Green Bay and the half-marathon I’m doing in about six weeks…