When I started running again last fall I picked up The Competitive Runner's Handbook by by Bob and Shelly-Lynn Florence Glover.  During my high school and college days I had the luxury of a coach to guide my training.  From that experience I have a reasonable understanding about how to train for distances from 5K to 10K.  My new goal race distance is the half-marathon and marathon for 2009.  While there are obvious similarities in training for a 5K and a marathon you can’t just take a 5K plan and multiply by nine.  The Competitive Runner's Handbook helped me begin to get a feel for the training regimen changes necessary to race at the marathon distance.  It even has suggested training schedules for runners of various ability levels.  Still, I wasn’t finding the information I was looking for.  There are a thousand and one half-marathon or marathon training schedules out there.  But where do they come from?  How are they created?  It wasn’t long before I realized that what I was really looking for was not a mini-encyclopedia of running but a book that would teach me how to be a coach so that I could coach myself. 

When I went looking for that kind of book I found Brad Hudson’s Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon: How to Be Your Own Best Coach.  In this book Hudson and his co-author Matt Fitzgerald lay out Hudson’s adaptive coaching philosophy.  In a nutshell Hudson approaches coaching each athlete as an individual with different strengths and weaknesses and seeks to tailor a plan that best suits their race goals.  The book is narrowly focused.  You won’t find chapters on nutrition, stretching, or race strategy.  While there are training schedules laid out in the back of the book, they are intended to be guidelines around which to build your own schedule.  So far I’m in week 7 of the half-marathon level 3 schedule.  I started at week one on January 4.  My plan is to stick as close to his 16 week schedule as possible leading up to the Country Music Half-Marathon.  From there I’ll should have plenty of information both from training and the race to assess where to go next in my training.  And that is what Hudson’s approach is all about – train, assess, refine, repeat.