Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a marathon training plan.

Yesterday I told you I got a subscription to Runner’s World.

This is the reason I did so.

As I’ve probably (maybe?) mentioned before, I will be running the Chicago Marathon with my friend Kevin. (Maybe not with with…although also maybe with with. That’s TBD. What I mean here is we both got in via the lottery and so we’re running the same race.)

That means we’ll be training at the same time this summer - him in South Carolina, me in Massachusetts.

We text about running a lot, and bandy about different training ideas and plans and such.

In the past I’ve done a Hal Higdon marathon training, because Kevin had used the half marathon plans. I’ve also done the Peloton marathon training, and passed some of those runs on to Kevin.

I combined elements of these trainings into a sort of customized training plan for myself another time.

But for this year I didn’t want to develop anything - I just wanted someone to tell me exactly what to do to train for a marathon.

And Kevin, who had a Runner’s World subscription, shared with me what their plan looked like.

I was immediately sold, and that’s why that afternoon I signed up (or attempted to, at least) for the subscription.

You can ignore the ‘Break 4:45’ part of the picture above - that’s not a new goal. I am still aiming at breaking 5 hours. But there’s really no difference between the 4:45 and the 5:00 training plans - this is just the one I downloaded.

What I like about the Runner’s World plan is it has the workouts listed in a calendar like any other plan - but down below it lists, day by day, exactly what you should be doing for each workout.

It doesn’t just say ‘Speed’ or ‘Interval’ workout, for example - it tells you how fast to run a workout and how far and what you should be aiming to achieve.

It’s basically exactly what I wanted.

I might customize this a little bit.

The workout plan doesn’t have any strength workouts in there, and that’s one of my favorite parts of marathon training, so I’ll fit those in somewhere.

And I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to do a 20-mile training run or if I’ll just build up to the 20-miler and make that race day.

But those are easy customizations. I don’t mind that.

I needed the workout descriptions, and that’s exactly what Runner’s World has given me.

It’s very exciting that we’re now just a few weeks away from actually using the plan.