First Half Marathon How to train for your first half marathon

Why most of your runs should be easy

In the late 1990s, Stephen Seiler, an American exercise physiologist living in Norway, watched one of the country's top cross-country skiers stop running at the bottom of a hill and walk up it. "And I said, well what the heck are you doing? No pain, no gain!" he told The Globe and Mail. "But it turned out she had a very clear idea of what she was doing." Seiler went on to spend years studying how top endurance athletes train. Most of their time, he found, is spent going easy.

The same holds for a first half. Easy miles do most of the work: they're most of a runner's week, and they're the base everything else stands on. Easy means you could talk in full sentences the whole way. If you need to walk a hill to stay there, walk the hill. It will feel too slow at first, and that's normal. Within about 8 weeks, that same pace starts to feel easier, and that's your fitness showing up.

The catch is that your easy isn't anyone else's easy, and a pace chart can't tell you what it is. Your own runs can. Buena Vida learns your paces as you log runs and sets each easy run from them, and the heart rate from your iPhone or Apple Watch shows you when an easy day drifted into a hard one.

Easy days are easy on the kitchen, too. A 30-minute easy run doesn't call for a gel or a special snack. Your normal meals cover it.

How the long run builds

In 2016, after years away from running, Keira D'Amato went out for a run with a modest goal. "At first, I could not even make my goal of running for three minutes; I had to adjust to 1.5 minutes," she said in 2022. About six years after that first run, at 37 and a mother of two, she broke the American women's marathon record in Houston.

Your long run grows the same way: a little at a time, from where you are now. A good first-half plan starts near the miles you already run, then adds half a mile or a mile to the long run most weeks, from a first long run of about 4 miles to a longest of 10 to 12. The slow climb is the point. Many running injuries start with one run that goes well past your longest run of the past month, and a steady build never asks for that jump. You won't run 13.1 miles before race day, and you don't need to.

The long run is about time on your feet, not speed. Walk breaks are fine. So is slowing down on a hill, or cutting a run short on a day that isn't working. "I have the maturity to know adjusting goals is a viable path to success, not a failure," D'Amato said.

This is also the day that needs the most food. Eat a real breakfast before it, then a proper meal after, with plenty of carbs to refill what the run used and some protein for repair. If you're starving all Sunday, Saturday's food came up short. And keep a record: if your longest run in the past month was 6 miles, a 9-miler this Saturday is a jump to notice before you start it.

Why rest days and easier weeks matter

Bill Bowerman coached track at the University of Oregon for 24 years, co-founded the company that became Nike, and in 1967 co-wrote a book called Jogging that helped get ordinary Americans running. At a time when most coaches preached that the more you put in, the more you get out, he gave his runners easy days to let their bodies recover. "When Bowerman first articulated the hard-easy method, he was widely despised for it," wrote Kenny Moore, one of his Oregon runners and later his biographer. Bowerman's own summary, as Moore tells it: "Stress, recover, improve, that's all training is. You'd think any damn fool could do it."

The runs are the stress. The getting better happens afterward, while you rest. That's why a first-half plan has more rest days than run days, and why every few weeks it gives you an easier week, with a shorter long run and shorter weekday runs, before the climb starts again. Training that piles up without a break raises the risk of injury and illness, and a lighter week built into the plan is the simplest way to avoid that.

It's tempting to skip the easy week because you feel great. Feeling great is a sign it's working, but it's only half the story: your heart and lungs adapt within weeks, while tendons and bone take months. The lighter weeks give the slow parts time to catch up.

Rest days aren't skip-a-meal days, either. That's when your body does its rebuilding, and it needs the materials. Eat a little less than on a long-run day, but eat, and keep the protein coming.

Do you need strength training for a half marathon?

In 2014, a team led by researcher Jeppe Bo Lauersen pulled together 25 trials, covering more than 26,000 people, on exercises meant to prevent sports injuries. Stretching made no real difference. Strength training did. "Strength training reduced sports injuries to less than 1/3 and overuse injuries could be almost halved," they wrote.

That's a strong reason to add a little strength work. You don't need a gym or heavy weights to start. Squats, lunges, step-ups, calf raises, and a few core moves, 20 to 30 minutes at a time, are plenty for a first half. Strength work lowers injury risk more than stretching does, and in studies of trained runners, it made running more efficient, too. About 2 sessions a week gets most of the benefit, and 1 is a fine place to start. Put it on a non-running day or after an easy run, and keep heavy leg work away from the day before a long run.

Strength days are when protein earns its place. Active people need more protein and more carbs than people who sit most of the day, so include some at every meal on strength days, not just in a shake afterward.

How to eat while training for a half marathon

Shalane Flanagan, who won the 2017 New York City Marathon and ended a 40-year drought for American women there, came up through college running believing that eating fat would make her fat. "And little did we know that we were just eating more sugar and processed foods," she told CBS News. With her best friend, the chef and nutritionist Elyse Kopecky, she changed how she ate, and the two wrote cookbooks about it. "I don't think I'd be sitting here, talking to you and running at a high level," she said, "if it weren't for the fact that I changed my diet."

You don't need a cookbook for a first half. You need food that rises and falls with your training. An 8-mile Saturday long run burns close to 900 calories for a 150-pound runner, and Sunday's rest day burns almost nothing extra. Eating the same amount every day means too little on the day that matters most. A simple pattern works: the most food on long-run days, with carbs before and after; a normal amount on easy days; a little less on rest days, with the protein kept up.

For most new runners, the bigger risk is eating too little, especially if you're hoping to lose weight along the way. The signs creep up: you're tired all the time, your legs never feel fresh, easy runs feel harder than they should, and you get sick more often. Running on too little food for too long stalls your progress. If weight loss is part of your goal, take it from your food overall, not by shorting the training days, and go slowly, because big deficits make getting sick and stress injuries more likely.

This is where most plans leave you on your own: the runs are on the fridge, the food is in another app (or nowhere), and nothing connects them. In Buena Vida, each run sets that day's food targets, so the two can't drift apart.

What a normal training week looks like

Emily Sisson, who set the American half-marathon record in Houston in 2023, once summed up what changes as her races get longer. "The biggest change from training for a 10K to training for a marathon is just more of everything," she told Fleet Feet. "More miles, more sleep, more fuel, more strength training."

A first-half week has the same ingredients, in smaller amounts. Here's week 7 of Buena Vida's 12-week first-half plans, at 3 days a week and at 4, with the food to match.

Strides are short, relaxed pickups of about 100 meters. Tempo is comfortably hard. Week total: 15 miles on 3 days, 15.8 on 4.

Most of the week is easy, one run is long, and the rest is recovery. The 4-day version spreads about the same miles over one more run, so weekday runs are shorter, with room for a little faster running once the base is in. Three days is plenty for a first half. Choose 4 if you like running more often, or if shorter runs fit your weekdays better.

Either way, it's the ordinary weeks that get you there. Steady, consistent running is linked to fewer injuries, not more, so the goal is a week you can repeat, not a heroic one. When Wednesday falls apart, move the run in Buena Vida or in your phone's calendar and the two stay in sync. Each plan also says what to do when you miss a day.

The last 2 weeks and race day

When the miles drop for the taper, the lighter last stretch, it's tempting to eat less to match. Sports dietitian and author Nancy Clark says that's backward. "The biggest mistake people make during the taper is underfueling because they're running less," she said in a New York Times piece. "You need to keep eating to recover from the training and store up nutrients for race day."

The last 2 weeks of your plan get lighter on purpose. The long run drops back a few miles, the weekday runs get shorter, and race week is little more than a short run or two before the big day, because cutting back before a race, while keeping a little faster running, helps you race better. You may feel restless, or oddly sluggish. That's normal, and the fitness is already in the bank.

So keep eating the way you have been, with carbs and protein at every meal. On race morning, eat the breakfast you've had before your long runs, start slower than feels right, and save your best miles for the end.

A few months earlier, 4 miles was your long run. On race day, you'll run 13.1.