Welcome to Team Orange. It’s so nice for me when I get a client who’s yet to meet most of the team. They are such a great bunch and I hope you get the opportunity to run with us.

As mentioned I coach Hastings Runners track on Monday evenings 6:15-7:30pm and then my own Team Orange session at the same time on Tuesday evenings. So if you ever wanted to do either, that’s fine, we can work them into the plan.

I work to “Training Load” rather than miles as it’s a much better way to ensure your schedule is consistent and progressive. In a nutshell Training Load is Time or Distance x RPE (Effort Level).

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT TRAINING LOAD. To be honest you don’t need to know too much about it. I’ll always set the sessions for you to follow. If during a week you miss a session or do extra, let me know so I can adjust the next run so you hit those weekly targets.

For example one of my runners messaged today and said they didn’t fancy their 60 mins easy, so I said fine but on Sunday can you now do 4 x 5km at marathon pace, rather than 3 x 5km. That balances out the training load for the week and means no fitness is lost despite a missed run.

The key elements to your training plan are a weekly intervals session which will work on speed. Then on Sundays a long run or half marathon session to improve your endurance.

I like to set sessions where you practice running at your race pace. The nearer to the race we get, the more kilometers you run at goal pace. This is to get you comfortable running at that speed.

The long run will also get progressively longer, peaking at 140 mins, only slightly longer than a recent half (or nearly 😜) that I saw on your Strava feed.

When we reach the races the long runs do drop slightly and events do tend to take more out of us. To compensate for the loss of long run I’ll be adding some threshold (tempo) sessions into the week as well.

There’s really good variety in there. There’s an average of just 2.3 runs midweek, as I know the challenge your lifestyle brings. So a real case of quality over quantity and doing those big sessions on a Sunday morning.

Speaking of which we generally run as a group at 8am. It’s a Hastings Runners group run but if you wanted to try it out first just let me know. Loads of the Team do this each week.