I’ve been reading up on various training schedules trying to decide which one I want to follow for my marathon in December. I’m pretty sure I’m going to do one of Pete Pftizinger’s schedules in his Advanced Marathoning book. There are a few problems I have with schedules that I found. They are:

• Most schedules seem to start on a Monday and show the weekly mileage on that basis. I prefer to have my week start on Sunday. The weekly mileage is a bit different depending on what day is used.
• I always have to work backwards from my marathon date to figure out when to start the plan and as I evaluate different length plans, it’s gets very tedious
• I like to have a printed plan showing what I would run on each day

To help with the above issues, I decided to put together a schedule generator which would let you choose your starting day of each week and also let you set the goal date. The schedule generator would then adjust the training plan based on your criteria and also let you create a 1-page PDF that you can print and stick on a wall.

I only have 4 training plans on there right now. Three from Pete Pfitzinger and one from Hal Higdon.

Visit the Training Plans and see what you think. I’ll add more plans over time.

Doing this small app was a good way for me to get my feet with with a new web framework called Django. If you’re into this sort of thing, you should check it out. I love it! It uses Python and for the first time, I didn’t feel like I was fighting with an environment. Elegant is the best word I can find to describe it. And this is from someone that hates writing web applications. I’m much more of a backend programmer.

Posted by derek in Training