This past year I ran my first marathon, which was both awesome and awful. Miles 21-25 were pretty miserable. (The proverbial hitting of the wall is a real thing.) But mostly it was awesome.
Training for the marathon, on the other hand, sometimes felt more awful than awesome. I am pretty motivated by achieving goals. [Okay that is an understatement – I am ridiculously motivated by goals. I make to-do lists daily, and get unnatural pleasure out of crossing off the little boxes when I am done.] So marathon training was the perfect way for me to keep up with running. But it also me feel like my whole life was taken over by running. Here’s how a typical weekend looked:

  1. Friday night go to bed early in order to wake up for running.
  2. Saturday morning spend one to four hours running.
  3. Saturday afternoon spend several hours recovering from running.
  4. Saturday night fall asleep early from exhaustion, due to previous running.
  5. Sunday try to cram in everything you couldn’t do earlier in the weekend, due to all that running.
All the time with the running!
Fortunately someone invented the idea of running half the distance of a marathon, and this idea fits into my life much more easily. Having a half marathon training plan forces me to run regularly (and not just wussy 15 minute runs after work where all I think about is what I’m going to have for dinner). The long runs are reasonable distances (at most ten miles, which takes me a little over 90 minutes). And it still gives me a goal to be motivated by.

All that explanation is leading me to my newest creation! Enter cute printable half marathon training plan. My obsession with Pinterest and TeachersPayTeachers means I have tons of cute fonts, and I wanted to create a plan that I could print out, put on my fridge, and cross off when I’m done. (It’s like a huge to-do list just for running!). So, here it is! I hope you can use it! Just click on the image to download.

[Note: This training plan is for someone who has been running somewhat regularly for maybe a year? Something like that. I wouldn’t use it if you are just beginning to run. There are lots of good ones out there, including the one I’ve used in the past. Also, I put a vague “cross train” on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I like to do yoga, biking, or rock climbing on these days, but everyone has their preferred method of cross-training.]