Is my plan reasonable?
I’ve always been reasonably athletic but age and life started getting in the way so my athletic fitness was at a lifetime low in Spring 2025. I biked throughout the summer and started running in October 2025 when it got too cold to bike.
I originally thought I could do a Marathon by spring 2026 but every time I tried to increase my mileage I’d run into issues like knee pain or shin splints. But other than breaks for illness and injury, I kept running throughout the winter.
Now that it’s warmer again I can add biking back into the mix and I can tell it’s helped my running a lot by giving my joints that little extra recovery time. I recently ramped up to 7.25 miles for my long run and my knees and joints are feeling good.
My goal is a November marathon. Plan is to add 1 mi per week with an easy week every 4th week. I want to run a minimum of 3 days per week with 2 or 3 bike rides the remaining days. I’d like to do more runs per week if possible but my plan is to use the biking to hopefully prevent the injuries I dealt with over the winter while continuing to build my aerobic base.
My main goal is just to finish. Based on what I’m doing now I’m probably looking at a 5 hour marathon. Would obviously love to go a lot faster but we’ll see what 6 more months of training does. Does this sound reasonable?