This is Part 4 of our series on How to Write Your Own Training Plan. You’ll find Part 3 here. Over the next 6 posts we’ll cover the following topics:
1. Intro
2. Definitions and Terminology
3. Where You Are and Where You Want to Go
4. The Elements of a Training Cycle (⭐You are here.)
5. Workout Purpose & Design - Endurance
6. Workout Purpose & Design - Threshold
7. Workout Purpose & Design - Speed & Hills
8. Putting it All Together - Micro, Meso, & Macrocycles
9. The Extras - Strength, Cross-Training, & Course-Specific Add-Ons
10. Taper & Race Prep
So far in this series we have talked about how to analyze your goal race to identify specific aspects you’ll need to address in training, and how to evaluate your current fitness, strengths, and weaknesses as an athlete. Your training will happen in the miles and decisions that will take you from the starting point of where you are today to the starting line of your goal race. An effective plan will not just improve your general fitness, but prepare you for the particular demands of the race physically and mentally.
From here on in the series, we’ll be building cumulatively each week to construct a training plan. If you haven’t yet completed the goal race analysis and athlete assessment from last week, you can find that here. If you have completed it, kudos–we’re now going to use your answers to organize and prioritize your training needs.
Course Specifics
Race distance (and/or duration for longer events), elevation profile, surface, and in some cases, general weather conditions are known quantities that will dictate many aspects of your training parameters. Secondary considerations like an uphill finish, technical skills like downhill running or running with trekking poles should also go on that list.
Now let’s translate those course specifics into training adaptations. Racing 26.2 miles requires developing both absolute endurance as well as speed endurance (durability). Half marathons and 10Ks are run very close to lactate threshold and rely even more heavily on speed endurance. Races 5K and shorter are run at paces closer to vVO2max, making pure aerobic capacity a priority in training. Hills require sustained power output, which can also be thought of as strength endurance. Preparing for heat or altitude also comes with specific training protocols that can be incorporated into your plan. If you struggle with nutrition or hydration in races, you can add these as well.
Make your list of fitness and skill requirements, and then revisit your athlete assessment. If you were to grade yourself today, how do you measure up on each of these items compared to where you need to be on race day? It’s helpful to actually rate yourself in some form–1-5, etc, to help you prioritize where you need to focus your training. This assessment also gives you a baseline for comparison as your training progresses.
How Many Weeks Do You Need?
We now have a roadmap for the areas and skills your training plan will need to address, and you should have a sense of which areas you’ll need to focus on. Now it’s time to get into the numbers that will structure your plan. First and foremost, how many weeks do you need (or have) to train? The length of your plan will broadly be determined by the length (or duration) of your goal race, but will individually vary depending on a number of factors:
- Physiology (fast- or slow-twitch dominance)
- Needed adaptations (and the time they take to develop)
- Your running history and experience
- Broader life and schedule needs
As a rough estimate, a marathon generally requires 12-16 weeks of training, a half takes 10-12, a 10K 8-12, and 5K (or shorter) 6-10 weeks. Where you fall in these ranges largely depends on how far your current fitness is from the specific demands of the race. We’ll get into the details of how long various adaptations take (and why) when we talk about workout design and progression.
For now, just keep in mind that endurance adaptations are the slowest to develop but also stick around the longest even with reduced training. It takes 6-8 weeks to improve aerobic endurance, and those adaptations will continue to grow with additional training. Speed and anaerobic systems are the quickest to develop, and those benefits start to appear after 2-4 weeks. Improving your lactate threshold falls somewhere in the middle, at about 4-6 weeks.
Based on your race distance and athlete assessment, you can now determine the overall duration of your training cycle and how you’ll block out time for the needed adaptions. Since endurance adaptations take the longest to develop and also provide the basis for improving lactate threshold, most longer distance plans begin with an aerobic emphasis. Threshold work and speed can then be introduced as base fitness develops.
For a runner planning a 12-week half marathon cycle who has most recently trained for a 10K, a plan might be organized like this:
Weeks 1-4: Aerobic emphasis
Weeks 5-9: Threshold training
Weeks 10-11: Speed
Week 12: Taper
A runner who had just completed a marathon could reduce (or eliminate) the aerobic phase and devote more time to speed development. Likewise, a runner coming off a summer track season might need 6 weeks of aerobic training with a light sprinkling of strides to maintain the speed they’ve already developed.
How Many Miles Do You Need?
The next question to address is what your weekly mileage should be. Again, this is very individualized and depends on a number of factors, but if you want to get faster, the answer is probably more than you’re currently doing. When you think about weekly mileage, the question is really what range is sustainable for you week after week. The mileage you maintain through the bulk of your plan is far more important than how high you can get during your peak week.
We’ll be talking about how and when to incorporate cross-training later, but keep in mind that easy miles can generally be swapped with other endurance modalities. While I’ll be referring to running mileage for the rest of this section, you can also sub other activities if you need or want more variety in your training.
If you are planning to increase your volume from where it was in previous cycles, adjust within reason. You will also need to add extra few weeks at the beginning of your plan to get used to a higher weekly volume before you start adding intensity with workouts. Volume can also be thought of more broadly than just a weekly tally. If in your previous training plan you spent 3 weeks at or above 45 miles, rather than increasing that to 3 weeks at 50 miles, you could choose to spend 6 weeks at 45 instead.
The final organizational component related to mileage is determining how many days you plan to train each week (noting that 7 is not recommended.) If you’re currently running 5 days a week and can only spend an hour on your training on weekdays, if you want to increase your weekly volume, adding a sixth day may be easier than cramming more miles into your existing runs. Your schedule needs to be realistic and sustainable, and the plan you can stick to is infinitely better than the ambitious one that doesn’t fit your life.
Bringing it Back to the Roadmap
You should now have an outline that includes the following:
- Attributes of the goal race that you need to prepare for
- Current assessment of your fitness, in the form of a race result or metric around which you can structure workouts
- A list of areas where you feel strong as a runner and areas where you might need improvement
- Your top priorities and any ancillary factors that your training will need to address
- An expected training cycle duration
- Outline of each week’s focus
- Number of runs/workouts per week
- Rough idea of average weekly mileage
Congratulations! You now have everything you need to build your training cycle!
Hard vs. Easy
Whether your goal race is one or 100 miles, a quality training plan will incorporate workouts focused on endurance, threshold, and speed and power. What varies will be the importance of each and how (and when) they are employed. While athlete physiology, goals, and abilities vary widely, one rule that seems to apply across all levels of training from pros to back-of-the-pack is that about 80% of your total volume should be done at easy/conversational pace. Those miles will improve your endurance capacity, smooth out the rough edges of your stride, and build fatigue resistance and time-on-feet.
Take the number you wrote down for your desired weekly mileage and multiply it by 0.8. This is the number of miles that will make up your easy miles each week. Ideally, your long run should take up about one third (maximally half) of your total easy miles, and whatever is left will go to recovery runs, warm-up, and cool-down miles
The remaining 20% of your miles are reserved for higher intensity work–generally threshold pace and faster. These “quality” miles are where most of your decisions are going to be made in regard to designing workouts, but it should be becoming clear that this is a small percentage of your overall mileage each week. Use them wisely!
Speed and threshold work imparts higher stress not only on your energy systems, but also to your bones and tissues. These stresses (when correctly applied) stimulate the body to adapt, getting faster and stronger. Faster paces and higher intensities also create higher forces, so ensuring you are rested and ready for these harder sessions is imperative, both for recovery and injury prevention. A study on bone stress forces at various paces1 found that increasing speed from 7:40 min/mi to 6:00 pace increased risk of bone stress injury by 7%. The higher stress is fine as long as it comes in appropriate doses, with sufficient fueling and recovery, but this is why managing the proportion of your volume spent at these intensities matters. How these workouts are placed in your week in relation to easy runs and rest days also affects the quality of your sessions and the risk of injury and overtraining.
You Have a Mileage Budget
Now that we understand the parameters, let’s put some numbers to this to understand what we’re really talking about. Let’s imagine a half marathoner who has run 3 previous halves, and her training for the last one averaged 35 miles per week. She wants to break 2 hours and would like to increase her average volume to 40mi/week and plans to peak at 50mi, running 5 days per week. An average week in the middle 4-8 weeks of a 12-week plan would look something like this:
- ~32 easy miles
- 10-15 miles will go to the long run, depending on the week
- 17-22 miles will go to easy runs (including warm-ups and cool-downs for quality sessions.)
- 8 miles will be devoted to speed / threshold / hill workouts each week (including recovery miles)
Most plans operate on three-ish quality sessions per week, with quality sessions traditionally falling on Tuesday and Thursday, and a weekend long run. If we plan for 2 miles of warm-up and 1-2 miles of cool-down for each quality session, we end up with two sessions with about 4 miles of decision-making that will determine the stimulus and adaptive focus each week.
In a 12-week plan, setting aside 1 week for taper, we have more or less 22 quality sessions to program, plus 11 long runs. Our task now is to prioritize stimuli, determine the order of operations, and decide how much time we’ll devote to each. Once we’ve established the general outline, we’ll layer on any of the course-specific training modalities–i.e. time on technical trails, heat training, gut training, etc, and decide when and how to apply these additional stressors.
Let’s Make a Plan!
Look back to what you identified as your training priorities for this race cycle. Let’s say it was: 1. Endurance; 2. Hills; 3. Finishing speed, with ancillary goals of improving comfort on technical trails and heat adaptations.
Our priorities for each week might be:
- Focused long run and meeting overall volume goals each week
- Doing one dedicated hill workout or ensuring the long run is over hilly terrain each week
- Getting in a run targeting durability every other week
- Aiming for 6 trail runs over terrain similar to the race, including 2 long runs
- Employing a sauna protocol or other heat acclimation strategy for the last 4 weeks before the race
Going back to our mileage budget, our week starts to take shape:
Monday: Rest Day
Tuesday: Hill workout or threshold run on hilly trail - 2mi WU/ 4mi Q /2mi CD
Wednesday: Easy Run - 6-8 miles
Thursday: Threshold, Progression Run. or HM Pace - 2mi WU/ 4mi Q /2mi CD
Friday: Rest Day
Saturday: Long Run - 10-15 miles
Sunday: Easy Run - 3-6 miles
The specifics of workout emphasis, long run distance, and bells and whistles will vary, but you now have the full structure of your plan laid out!
Next week we’ll start digging into the science of workout design, beginning with aerobic development, and why it’s not just about long, slow distance!
1. Edwards WB, Taylor D, Rudolphi TJ, Gillette JC, Derrick TR. Effects of running speed on a probabilistic stress fracture model. Clin Biomech (Bristol). 2010 May;25(4):372-7.
