Collin,
There is certainly an art and a science to customizing your plan. Even when you are presented with a finite number building blocks for the week, there are many ways to order those blocks.
The process of customizing a week can be so complex, that we actually dedicated an entire chapter to that process in Chapter 8 of our book 80/20 Triathlon. For you and anyone who already has an 80/20 plan, you already have the “ingredients.” The 80/20 ratios are already built into the week so you are already halfway there, so with the ratios already set, you just have to worry about two things: frequency and recovery.
Frequency- It’s better to run 3 days every other day for a week than 3 days in a row with 4 days off. Just ensure that your workouts are spread out. This is easy with a running plan, more challenging with a triathlon plan when you have to do it per sport.
Recovery- This is the more challenging part of customizing a week. The 80/20 principle falls apart if all the 20% intensity is done at once and the 80% easy all done at once. You need recovery after the intensity and spread out that load. The hard rule is that you can go 2 days in a row of hard workout, but never 3 days in a row before an easy/recovery day. “Hard” does not just mean workout with intensity, “hard” also means long workouts that take much more time to recover from (about a 2-hour of running or 4 hours of cycling).
In your particular example, your changes meet all requirements. Your “hard” workouts the first week are the RFF2, RL2, and RSP3. They are spread out by at least a day of “easy”. Same with the second week, the long and intense workouts are spread out, so well done!
Regarding strength workouts, as long as these are done 1) at least one day apart, and 2) not the same day as the longest run of the week they can be moved at your convenience.
David
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