Helen -- Congrats I am so proud of you!!

I have just been running 5k 3-4 times/week and I'm very happy with that at the moment...

3.7 miles this morning. I'm keeping the pace relatively easy (not least because i've still got this cold) but it feels good to be doing something, even if it's not huge mileage compared to what I was doing before the taper.

Helen, When you were training how many days a week did you run and how did you work the mileage per day? I understand training for a marathon would be a lot more drastic to get the mileage in required, but I'm just curious. Now that the marathon is over what will be a normal run week for you?

Got my planned 3.5miles in last night. A very good start and beautiful finish. My pace was just a little slower for my first mile, but I was able to finish my other two and half miles at just under my 12min/mile pace.

I was mainly doing 5 days a week, 2 short runs (3 - 5 miles), 2 medium runs (5 - 8 miles) and one long run (8 - 20 miles). The mileage built up from around 25 up to 43 at the peak of the training.

Now what I'm aiming to do (roughly) over winter is to do about 20 - 25 miles per week, with 2 shorter easy recovery runs, 1 longish weekend run (up to about 10 miles) and 1 quality session switching between hills and speedwork midweek. I'm not planning to do exactly the same every week, but working on that rough pattern. I've got a half marathon in January so I might switch to a proper training plan for that in mid November and ramp up the mileage a bit, but until then I'm just going to take it a bit easier without losing too much endurance. I don't want to go back to the situation where building up to 10 miles seems hard, but I don't want to regularly run too much further than that while my legs recover.

Thanks Helen - very good information. I've been increasing my weekly miles by just under 10% by adding an extra lap (1/4mile) each week to my Tuesday and Saturday runs (more energy those days, go figure), but I'm wondering if I could actually push a little harder, maybe adding 1/2m to each Saturday run.

I have a 10k planned for Nov 11, and I can do just under 4miles now and my plan is to be able to do at least 5miles by Oct end. But I wonder if I can ramp my training up and try for at least 6miles before the run. I just want the experience, realizing that I will probably not be able to run the entire 6.2miles, but one day will.

Cool Runners is now closed for September, cya in October