Welcome to the Team. I’ve started off with a 10 week plan as I’m a little cautious about your recent injury and how the training might impact that.

With that in mind, starting off with a very sensible approach to the running is wise. We can always switch out one of the runs for some additional cross training if the achilles does start to niggle.

I’ve put HHM in the plan but more as a long easy run than actually a race. I think it would be a lot to ask to go from almost scratch to running a fast half marathon in 10 weeks. Although that said it would be great if you were able to take part.

Don’t worry too much about which days the sessions currently fall on. Every week your sessions are added to the dashboard and once I know your shift patterns I can tweak the schedule to best suit that.

My plans use a system called training points where each session is worth a certain number of points. It’s basically another way of saying “Training Load”. And the pts are calculated based on the time or distance spent exercising multiplied by the intensity of the effort.

If you hit your weekly points target (95-110%) you will be listed in the 100% club, which is shared on the Team Orange WhatsApp group.

Those that have consistently hit their targets have seen excellent results and those that don’t, tend to struggle or get injured.

If you have any questions about how this works, just ask. The average points for this plan is just under 100, which is quite moderate in truth. For a comparison my quicker marathon runners will be hitting about 160 points per week.

But it’s about finding the right level for you at this moment in time, keeping it consistent from one week to the next and slowly adding on points to ensure progression. For example week 1 is worth 80 pts, week 7, the peak week of this plan you will achieve 110+ points.

I’ve put 3 runs in the schedule. a swim and 2 gym sessions. The gym sessions will focus on S&C with a bit of cross training.

At first it really is a guessing game for me in terms of what weights you should be using for the exercises. So my advice is take a few weeks to find the right weights and then feedback that to me, then I can update the session on the dashboard.

I’ve also left track out until week 7. Whilst this might be frustrating, the track sessions at the moment are the toughest they will be all year, because we’ve been building slowly for the Half Marathon. In a few weeks they will get easier and I think at that point, hopefully the achilles will be fine and you can join in.

If you feel like you are ready before that to come and join track then we can add it earlier.

I’m excited to work with you and hopefully this is the beginning on a long relationship. I’ve got over a dozen runners on the team now who’ve completed 5 plans or more. Some are into double figures which is great. I think their loyalty to me highlights these plans and methods of training do work, you just need to be patient at first to build up slowly.

Let’s do this!!