The other day I saw a man running home from the park, his legs and trainers were caked in mud and I was jealous of him. I am definitely over-due for a run.

My first run of the new year is a tad over-due but finally done.  Do I have any excuses? Well – not really although I am going to give you some. So lets see.

My trouble began back in September 2012, my half marathon performance demoralised me more than I realised and it took me a while to get back into the swing of running. Fast forward to November and a severely sprained ankle, plus some truly awful shoes pretty much ended my 2012 season a fully four weeks earlier than expected.

All that aside, 2013 is cruising along and I have a new plan – I was reading an article in Runners World in which a seasoned marathon runner and writer for Runners World went for a run with a mate from up’north who just does 5 & 10ks. What I got out of the article is that my base fitness needed some focus so I have decided to get my 5k and 10k times up for the first few months of 2013.So here is the data, my first run of 2013 was a 5K.

My plan is to run 5K at around 5:30/kilometer for the next week, running a longer run (say 5 miles) at an easy pace once a week – so every 7th run will be an easy long run. The plan is to increase my 5K pace until I am down to a race time between 20 and 22 minutes. Once I have achieved that I will move onto running a 40 minute 10K.

With the long runs, I’ll start at 5miles and increase the distance by 1 mile ever 2 weeks. I am still planning to run adventure races this year, but the first race of the season isn’t going to be until May and this training plan fits with this.

How is your running going this year?