Effect of shortening the plan

by Tom O'GARA
(France)

Shortening the 100 day plan and the effect on the overall results :

"Hi Marius

Thanks for you previous response regarding adjusting the plan to cope with injury.

My question is this:

Obviously the ideal is to do the plan for the full 100 days. What effect will it have in terms of performance if you have to shorten the plan to say 70 days.

Also reading through other reponses I saw you mentioned it's important to keep the muscular system going. My ciatic problem isn't letting me run at the moment (pins and needles still in the thigh and back pain) but walking is fine now. Should I be doing some sort of long walks to get things going? At the same time I don't want to rush in and make the recovery even longer by being to bullish.

Just getting a bit stressed the time off is going to effect my performance.

Tom"

Answer: Hi Tom and thanks for your question.

You are right, it can effect the overall performance - what matters the most though (on how much) is the shape and training system you used before going into the 100 day plan. So it is very hard to say how much, it is all a matter of the initial shape + previous experience you had.

In either way, the half marathon 4 weeks before will give you a great indication on what time to shoot for in the upcoming marathon.

As for your situation, one thing you can do - that should work real well is to

1) do hard cardio intervals on a bike (if you can) or step machine

2) straight thereafter go into walking, where you vary the pace within the walking pace quite a bit. Long if you can, but do not push this.

This will give you a nice overall cardio fitness while also the best you can in terms of muscular specifics.

You can also test out walking quite steeply uphill on a treadmill that works nicely as well.

There is no need to worry at this time though, just do the best you can and do evaluations like this much later in the schedule !

I wish you all the best,

kind regards,
Marius