Planning for my full marathon next year

It has not taken long after I ran the Half Marathon race for the first time, only 2 days!! Now I am planning my full marathon attempt - I intend to do the Gold Coast FULL Marathon next year.

The full marathon is an altogether different thing to the half, the body is pushed to an extreme, much more so than the half. I am a bit of a sook so I want to make sure that my run is as pain free as possible, ie the good sort of pain. My half marathon training seems to have delivered a good performance, so I will use the same basic method - regularity, rest and consistency.

Now, I have 52 weeks or so the prepare this time, instead of 19 weeks for the half. I should make some big gains in speed over that time if I can remain injury free. I have a Intermediate level Training Schedule for the full marathon over a 20 week period, so I could see if I can do that 20 week cycle twice - perhaps with a 12 week break in the middle where I do say a 10km training schedule to help build up speed. Not at all sure what I will do yet, I may seek some advice on that.

Also I found this really useful tool on the web http://eifler.com/ to help calculate a race plan. Based on my recent HM run, where I did 1 hour 38:58, the tool tells me that I could aim realistically for a 3:31 full marathon. That is encouraging, and I can expect some improvement over the year so perhaps if all goes well, a sub 3:30 is a good goal.

So, back to some training again, today I will do a 1 hour run to shake out the cobwebs after two days of bugger all and booze :)