Hello, this is Debbie Boyles, coach at Mojo for Running, and this is episode number five of the Smart Running podcast.

Today, we'll talk about the third principle to apply when planning a training schedule.

The first step was the hard, easy training principle.

The second consideration was the weekly long run.

Today, we'll discuss how to put those together to make a logical micro cycle and then how to group those micro cycles into three phases, which together comprise a macro cycle.

Believe me, it sounds more complicated than it is.

Now, we said that you should plan your week with alternating hard easy days and perhaps two easy days in a row.

Then once a week, you want to include a long run that is about three times as long as your short or easy weekday runs,

and at least a third longer than your long weekday runs. So an example might be three miles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, six miles on

Tuesday and Thursday, and nine miles on Sunday, with Saturday as a complete rest day. That would

be an example of a one-week micro cycle. So a microcycle

is the smallest increment of your training schedule. Most people use a week because it fits into

their weekly work schedule, but your micro cycle could just as easily be eight days or 10 days.

Another way to look at it is that your micro cycle might be 14 days if, like me, you only do a really long run every two weeks.

I find that my body responds much better to that, probably because even though I have many

years of running behind me, it takes me two weeks

to really recover from a very long run. This is only when I'm training for a marathon, though,

which means my long runs then are much longer than they would be during other macro cycles.

The rest of the time, I am on a weekly micro cycle like most other people.

Remember, one huge advantage of planning your own training schedule is that it's easy to customize

it to your body, and it's easy to tweak it if you think a change would be beneficial.

Now let us look at macro cycles.

...