Planning Out Your Training

What about "periodizing" your training plan?

Check out Marisa Carter's post on www.active.com about how to plot out your training strategy for an event. The approach is referred to as "periodization".

It focuses on building yourself up, tearing yourself down and the importance of your recovery. Any training plan is pretty much built on this theory and how you must tear yourself down, but allow for periods to build yourself back up.

This post is pretty detailed, but it offers great rationale as to why this approach is beneficial to most athletes.