Thank you for the opportunity to work with you. It’s something new for me and I love the challenge. I really feel like my model can work well across the multiple disciplines and I’m hoping going forward to incorporate lots more cross training into my own plans.

So how does it work? I set a target that I feel is right for you. The strong marathon runners I work with 3:30 and below will generally work to around 150pts so that felt like a good number to begin with.

More recently you had been peaking at just over 100, so we start off at 120 and slowly build, peaking around 165, a few months before the race. The numbers just give you an idea of the progression involved in the planning.

The plan itself is rather straight forward. I always like to keep things as simple and as consistent as possible. Success is not achieved by working really hard over a short period of time. It’s earned by consistency over a sustained block. Showing up, week in week out, and just being solid.

So we have 2 runs per week. Track is a mainstay. If there are any weeks, for whatever reason you can’t make track, you have the alternative of my Tuesday group, same time, various locations in Hastings, always the same training pts. Or you could do a session closer to home on your own.

We always want 1 rest day, at least. Doesn’t matter when, so long as you’re not training 7 days a week, I’m happy.

2 swims. I think you’ve got this locked down. I have extended some of the swims, so we might want to discuss this as the plan evolves, so there are some 45 min and 60 min swims scheduled later on. I’m not sure how this works with booking the lane you do, but we can change it if need be.

2 cycles. One endurance based long cycle and then the higher intensity session. At the moment, on the plan, that is simply listed as Spin, with a time. So for me a higher intensity cycle session would include the WU and CD(10-15 mins combined) and then the middle part would probably be 30-50% at high intensity, with 50-70% active recovery.

I’m more than happy for you to choose sessions from Zwift which fit the criteria, or that’s something we can discuss as the plan evolves. I’m going to download zwift tomorrow to explore a little and I might add some of their sessions to my own platform to allocate to your schedule. I’ll let you know about that. But as long as one of the bike rides is easy, one with intensity, that’s all that matters.

xfit. Twice a week I’ve put it. As I say the plan is super flexible, so some weeks you might want to replace one of the other disciplines with an extra xfit. Or as the plan evolves you might feel one of the disciplines needs more work than the other, in which case we can then change things up and dedicate an extra session to that workout.

My only concern right now, is with track, one spin, 2 xfits, you have 4 high intensity sessions in there. Which is a lot. Most of my runners only do 2 big sessions per week. To be honest what you could do to negate this is during your xfit classes just hold back on the intensity when doing the cardio segments. Or we could look to alter the balance of the plan, depending how you feel as the weeks tick by. But I just wanted to highlight that concern straight away.

There’s also a week off in the middle which ties in nicely as we can separate the training into 2 x 12 week blocks. It might be the case that a winter bug sweeps town and you need an enforced week off. In that scenario we can just add some training to the rest week, so it’s good to have it at our disposal.

I think that’s it. I’ve put some sessions on your dashboard for this week, just so you can have a play around with it and see how things work in terms of feedback and rescheduling (I can do this if need be) sessions. But we’ll start fresh from next Monday.