This will be my 4th Hot Chocolate 15k race. I am super excited because the swag is epic and the race is put together extremely well. It’s usually cold as anything for the race, but I am used to that so I won’t be concerned; yay for winter gear! Plus, my two favorite companies that I use for Fuel and am an ambassador of now, Honey Stinger and Nuun, are sponsors. Anyway, I thought I would share my training plan, as I know people are always looking for ideas for their training.

Training Intention

When training, you always want to pick a plan for a purpose. Your purpose could be completing, going for a specific time, or a PR. Whatever your preference, make sure your plan reflects what you want to achieve.

For me, I want to do the race at a 10 minute per mile pace. This means my chip time should be around 1 hour 33 minutes. My overall time, who knows, as it’s staggered starts. Anyway, since I haven’t run in 6 months, I have lost a lot of endurance and strength, as I have done almost no working out. Sure, I have done some strength training and cross training, but very inconsistently. In addition, I still kept my eating habits from IM training, which did not help either.

So, I needed a training plan that would really just ease me back into things, but still push myself. I went with a mostly duration-based training plan. I’ll write up info on types of training plans and their benefits at a later time.

The Plan

I usually build my own plans, but since Hot Chocolate provides a training plan via Enmotive, I went with that. Since I did that, to avoid any sharing issues, I will be providing an overview of the training plan. This is why I usually build my own plans, since I like sharing.

The plan is 12 weeks long and focuses mostly on duration-based sessions. However, like any good running plan, it has all of the right ingredients; easy runs, cross-training (XT) days, pace, intervals, and long runs. Most importantly, it makes sure you have at least 2 rest days. You will see in most plans I do, there is only 1 rest day. That is only because those plans assume I have some sort of base level fitness and endurance. When starting fresh like this, 2 days of rest is key.

The gist of the plan is outlined below.

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 2	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 3	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 4	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 5	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 6	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Pace	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 7	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 8	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 9	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Pace	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 10	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Interval	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 11	Rest	Easy	XT or Easy	Pace	Rest	Easy	Long
Week 12	Rest	Interval	XT or Easy	Easy	Rest	RACE

I do apologize that I cannot give more specific detail, but you can always follow me on Strava or Garmin Connect to see what I actually do. With the above plan, I do plan on getting in some additional strength workouts in to help with my progress. I am also tracking everything I eat via Lose It. In the past I have been a big fan of My Fitness Pal, but my goals don’t require such a detailed system. Plus, it’s extremely clunky and out-dated compared to many of the other trackers out there, especially Lose It. I’ll write up a comparison of a few of the popular ones at a later time.

Anyway, that’s my plan and I can’t wait to run the race again. Hope everyone out there has great luck with your training!