Miscellany: Mulliga Runs a Marathon, Part 2 - The Plan

A big part of training for a marathon is planning.  Most first-timers have to block off a solid four to five months prior to the big race, in order to schedule dozens of types of running workouts - easy runs, long runs, tempo runs, interval runs, and everything in between.  It can get fairly complicated:

I am mostly sticking to Hal Higdon's "Novice 1" program, which boils down to three runs during the week (including 1 semi-long/speedy run), and one long run on the weekend. The name "Novice 1" might imply the plan is easy, but the peak weekly running mileage gets to a healthy 40 miles, which I suspect is more than the vast majority of the U.S. population runs in a week.