I must be training for a serious race because

There's a schedule on my fridge.

I've been in what I would call Middle Distance Land for a good long while now, averaging 20 - 30 miles a week (mostly high 20's) and racing at 15K to half marathon distance.  My schedule hasn't varied much in the past year or so; in fact sometimes I've wondered why I even bother to post my workouts, at the right.  If it's Tuesday, I must be running and going to karate.  Etc.  Yawn.  Hence, I really haven't had need for the old schedule on the fridge thing, since what I was doing was working, and I really didn't need a piece of paper to tell me to stick to the routine.

But it's time for me to get serious about this ultra thing, and to that end, I've come up with a training plan that is now printed up and posted.  I came up with it by slightly modifying (rejiggering the days to suit my schedule) something out of some running magazine that I've had lying around since spring of 2008.  I think because I have been toying with the ultra idea for such a long time, I was able to set a PR in settling on this schedule, a process that usually requires days of reviewing and comparing at least a half a dozen training plans and mapping out of multiple mock schedules.  This time, I think it took me longer to type the thing out than it did to say, "Yep, that's it."

The schedule is not actually all that different from my current schedule, except that this one contains an actual rest day (well, two, theoretically, except one is Saturday, a karate day - but hey, I won't run or lift on that day!) and cuts my strength training from three to two days a week.  And, of course, the mileage and particularly the long runs go up over time.  For strength, I plan to continue with NROL/Abs for as long as it plays out (I'll have to talk about Phase 3 at some point - suffice it to say, I really like it so far).  I may not experience much in terms of strength gains, but I wasn't really expecting to considering my running emphasis. 

The race I'm shooting for is a 12 hour race to be held over Labor Day weekend.   It's run on trails so I'm not really sure what I can realistically hope to do in terms of mileage.  Minimally I'd like to do 50K and my goal of goals is to do 50m.  We'll see, eh?