Running Plan Review Run to the Finish 20 Week Marathon Training Plan

Does it build you up smartly?

The plan builds in a sensible order, but it says too little about each session for that order to do its full job.

A 5.5-mile long run in week 1 tells you a lot about a plan. This one starts where a runner with a modest base already is, and gives itself months to get somewhere. That patience suits a marathon plan, and plans that shift their emphasis over time, rather than repeating one kind of week, tend to beat training that never changes.

The first 2 weeks are all easy running with strides, and harder sessions arrive from week 3. Fartleks, hill sprints and short marathon-effort repeats fill the long middle, and the last weeks before the taper turn toward the race, with long runs that finish at marathon effort or build as they go. The plan never names its stages, but it does build in a sensible order.

The sessions are also thinly described. Each one tells you what to run, such as 4 one-minute efforts at moderate effort with a minute of recovery, but not why it's there or what it should feel like. The weekly notes add the occasional tip, but a runner who wants to understand the training has to work it out alone.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly, and for the runner this plan is written for, the parts it misses matter.

A first or second marathon is a long stretch of new demands on a body that hasn't met them before. Your blood and muscles tend to adapt within the first few weeks, while tendons take weeks to a few months and bone takes months to show change, so the slower parts set how fast the running can safely grow. Sudden jumps in running load tend to raise injury risk, and weekly rises above about 30% are a warning sign, especially for newer runners.

This plan has one of those jumps early. In week 6, your weekly running goes up by about a third. In the same week, 2 new kinds of hard session appear for the first time: marathon-effort repeats on Tuesday and hill repeats on Thursday. Your legs meet more running and harder running together, after only 5 weeks of training. Week 15 does the same on a smaller scale, with a jump of about a fifth and the first progression long run, 15 miles with the effort rising as you go.

The lighter weeks come late, too. In weeks 4 and 8, the long run gets shorter, but the rest of the week stays about the same, so your legs don't get much of a break. The first truly lighter week comes in week 12. From then on, one arrives every 3 or 4 weeks, which is about right. Load that piles up without a break tends to raise the risk of injury and illness, and a plan you follow on your own needs that relief built in. For the first 11 weeks, you keep stacking without that pause.

And nothing tells you what to watch for. A runner new to the marathon often can't yet tell an ordinary ache from the start of a problem. Many runners find that a low-grade ache that hangs around between runs can be the first step toward a full injury, though the research on it is early and comes from soccer players. Knowing to ease off when one appears is exactly the kind of guidance a newer marathoner needs, and this plan doesn't give it.

Most hard sessions do start with 2 easy miles or 15 easy minutes, which works as a built-in warm-up. But the plan says little about what a warm-up should include beyond telling you to always do one, and a few of the late fartleks have none written in.

Strength is a partial gap too. The plan puts it on the calendar twice a week, which helps, because strength training cuts injury risk in sport. But it names the day and leaves the rest to you. What each session holds, and how hard it should be in a week with a long run on Saturday, is your call.

There are good habits here. The harder days never come back to back, and Sundays are set aside for recovery, with foam rolling, stretching or a walk offered as options.

What happens when you miss a day?

Twenty-four weeks is a long time to go without a setback. Somewhere in there, most runners lose a few days, and the most useful plans are the ones that say which runs to protect and how to get back on track.

This plan doesn't. Every run sits on the calendar with equal weight. Take week 14, with marathon-effort repeats on Tuesday, hill sprints on Thursday and 14 miles on Saturday. If that week only has room for 2 runs, nothing tells you which 2 to keep. Nothing covers a missed week, an illness or a return after time off.

The plan does a few things well. It states clearly who it's for: runners with a long run of 5 or 6 miles and 3 or 4 runs a week behind them. It also keeps telling you to run your easy days and long runs by effort, not by the watch. That makes it more forgiving on tired or hilly days, because the target moves with you. And Brooks hands you the spreadsheet to copy and change, and lets you treat rest days as rest or active recovery. The message is that you know your life better than a sheet does, which is fair.

But a copy you can edit is not the same as advice on how to edit it. With a race date fixed and 24 weeks to fill, the plan leaves most of the hard calls to you.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Mostly, yes. The plan builds the fitness a marathon needs, with 2 gaps at the end.

A marathon asks your legs to keep going for hours, and most coaches build the long run for that reason. Marathoners whose training includes longer long runs tend to finish faster, though the evidence is early and no one has tested whether shorter, faster sessions could do the same job. This plan gets that right. The long run climbs patiently to 18 miles in week 19, repeats it in week 21, and peaks at 19 miles in week 22. The biggest weeks top out around 37 miles, a sensible peak for a runner on 4 days a week. Marathon-effort running shows up through most of the build, in growing amounts.

The first gap is the taper. A planned drop in training before a race improves race performance compared with not tapering, and this plan has a taper, but it comes as a cliff. Two weeks out, you run one of the biggest weeks of the plan, including its longest run. The next week, your running drops by half. The tiredness from that 19-miler has 2 weeks to drain, which is a tight fit.

The second gap is steady, sustained running that grows through the build. Most of the marathon-effort running comes in short pieces: quarter miles, half miles, 4-minute repeats. Holding an effort for miles at a time only happens in a couple of long runs, so that work never builds week by week. Marathon-effort running and threshold running (the effort you could hold for about an hour) are different kinds of training, and for recreational runners either is a reasonable choice. Here, both come in short doses.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. Variety is the plan's best quality, and it keeps 24 weeks of marathon training interesting.

About 90 percent of the running is easy, and that's as it should be: easy running makes up most of a runner's week and carries everything harder. On top of it, the plan adds short bursts that are truly hard, like the 10 one-minute hard efforts in week 10, the hill sprints, and the last step of a 3, 2, 1 minute ladder. Mixing clearly hard efforts into easy running may build endurance a little better than steady, medium-hard miles, though recent reviews find the edge is small.

The harder days rarely repeat. Fartleks and hill sprints take turns, marathon-effort repeats come in 5 different shapes, and 2 long runs build in effort as they go. Much of it is gentle by marathon-plan standards. A minute at moderate effort is a friendly way to learn to run faster, and it suits a runner who's newer to hard sessions.

The early weeks also end several easy runs with 5 or 6 strides of 20 seconds each, with a jog between. They're over in minutes, and short, fast efforts can make your running more economical, though the evidence is mixed and strides themselves haven't been studied directly.