Marathon Training – The Graphs Edition

The Seattle Marathon is one week from today. I still have a few runs to do next week to complete my taper but I’m confident that they’ll go fine. That’s why I’m ready to present the graphical summary of this training cycle. Running is just a big excuse for me to make graphs. I may or may not have spent the better part of a Saturday night at home alone making these graphs! First up is the training graph I make prior to all my major races.

The first feature that jumps out is the big drop in mileage during weeks 5 and 6. This was a planned break I took during my trip to Europe. My total training mileage was 443.3 miles (713.4 km) with the biggest week coming in at 41.3 miles (66.5 km) and a longest long run of 21.3 miles (34.3 km).

Next I thought it might be fun to compare this training cycle with my 2007 Ottawa marathon training cycle.

Not surprisingly they’re somewhat similar (except for the break for the vacation) since both plans were based on Smart Coach plans. This time around I started at a much higher base mileage since I was coming off my 30-on-30 training. I made a second version of this graph that shows the different types of runs. There’s a lot of colour going on though and I think it’s a bit much to take in. I did want to compare my training by run types though so I came up with the following graph.

This time around I did more long run mileage. I also did more recovery run mileage but I think that might because I was more inclined to call a run a recovery run this time around whereas I might have just called it an easy run in 2007. It’s so hard to get consistent data! I also made a second version of this graph where the x-axis is the proportion of miles instead of absolute mileage.

All of these graphs were made using Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac.

Now that the graphs are done I can go back to obsessive weather checking.