What Type of Workouts Should I be doing NOW?

As many of you know, at Coronado High School, we subscribe to the Daniels' Running Formula for our basic progression, intensity, and type of workouts from week to week. The problem with this approach, however, is not all of our runners are at the same point. Ideally there are four 6-week phases (24 weeks total) culminating with the last meet of the season. Because of this Daniels has prioritized the training depending on how many weeks a runner has until his or her last meet of the season. Phase-I is basically easy, steady running. In Phase-II repetition work and hills are added for early quality training. Phase-III is a transitional period to higher quality work, and in Phase IV the mileage will decrease slightly but the work bouts will be harder with races considered as part of this training.  Only the track distance kids who took a week off after our track season and who will make it all the way to the state meet the 3rd week in November will have this much time. This is also complicated by an athletes' fitness when they start the program, some require less Phase-I training because of prior fitness and some, who are just starting, will require more. For example, members of last year's Cross Country team who also ran track are now in Phase-II but those runners who ran cross country but participated in some other spring sport should stay in Phase-I for a couple more weeks.

Daniels has prioritized all of this based on the number of weeks left in an athlete's season (his/her last race). In the chart below the numbers to the right of each Phase number correspond to the number of weeks available, ignore any number higher than the number of weeks until your last race. For example if you had only 4 weeks available the first three you'd do Phase-I workouts and the final week would be Phase IV. You'd miss out on the two middle phases, but considering the limited time you have to train this would be the best approach.
 
Master Chart for determining the duration of each Phase
Phase I: 1, 2, 3, 13, 21, 23
Phase II: 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 20
Phase III: 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16
Phase IV: 4, 5, 6, 17, 22, 34

A practical example…
Let's say you want to start tomorrow
Let's use July 22nd as a starting date for a beginning runner. Because it's unlikely such a runner will progress to the CIF championships, the end of his/her season will be the league finals in the 1st week of November… about 15 weeks out.  The Phase Chart below shows which weeks in this progression should be devoted to what phase.
 
Since there are only 15 weeks available I've eliminated week numbers over 15.
 
This leaves…
Phase-I running 4 weeks (1, 2, 3, 13)  --  To August 19
Phase-II running 3 weeks (10, 11, 12) - To Sept 2
Phase-III running 5 weeks (7, 8, 9, 14, 15) - To Oct 7
Phase-IV running 3 weeks (4, 5, 6)
  
Bottom line is if you're just starting you should just go out and run easy every day for the next month! If you can't run for a full 30 minutes take brief rests and start again…. I'll post more about this tomorrow.
-Coach Green