[Mike Murrow]

I’m using the maintenance plan and really like it. I’m looking at either repeating it or trying the half, or marathon or even the 50k plan next. I also strength train 3-4 days per week. For the sake of time management, I’m curious if it’s I’ll advised to do two of the run workouts back to back or combined on the same day? Also, does it matter if I move planned workouts around? I’m guessing I don’t want to have “hard” interval days back to back. For example, combine a couple 35 minutes zone 1, zone 2 days together for a total of 60 minutes. In the end there would be, say, 3 run days instead of 5. Maybe have a Saturday long run that is 2 or three run workouts combined.

I would still want to stick to the same weekly planned volume and intensety.

I hope this makes sense.

[David Warden]

Mike, makes total sense.

In fact, our Level 3 plans often have 2-a-day workouts, so this is not unusual. If you are going to double-up and deviate from the Maintenance plan as written, I think it is better to perform the workouts AM and PM as opposed to back-to-back, in general, but back-to-back is fine.

When you move workouts around, you’ve exactly right, we want to avoid two days of high intensity in a row. We’ve spaced those hard workouts out using an easy-hard pattern so that you can fully recover between intense workouts. It’s OK to have two days in a row of high intensity (in fact, in many of our advanced plans there are 4 high intensity workouts a week, so we have to have two in a row), but I would never have 3 in a row.

You might benefit from Chapter 8 of our book 80/20 Triathlon, which covers how to create a custom week of 80/20 training. The principles apply to running as well.

David

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