Who’s behind this review? Buena Vida is a running app made by David Cole, a Seattle runner & triathlete who led design and research for Amazon’s Halo fitness band. Every plan here, including Buena Vida’s, is scored on the same 30 measures, each tied to published research. AI does the first scoring and draft, then every claim is checked against its studies. No plan author pays to be reviewed, and we run no ads. See a mistake? Email David at corrections@buenavida.run · How we score →
This marathon plan from Jack Daniels is an 18-week build that trains at 56 to 70 miles a week, and it rests on one idea: two hard sessions a week, with everything else easy. Daniels was an exercise physiologist who studied under Per-Olof Åstrand and later worked as Nike's physiologist, and his training shows it. Every kind of run has a job in the body, and every pace comes from a race result through the tables in his book.
The two hard days are where this plan shines. They're long and layered: up to 12 straight miles at marathon pace inside a 17-mile run, threshold repeats that add up to 10 miles of work, and hard miles placed after an hour of easy running, so you learn to hold an effort on tired legs. For a runner with the base, that's serious, specific marathon training. But the plan asks you to run 7 days a week for 18 weeks with no lighter week until race week, and the strength work the book recommends never reaches the schedule. The fitness it builds is real, but it leaves you little room for error.
Decent
| Structure | 3 | |
| Prevention | 4 | |
| Flexibility | 4 | |
| Readiness | 5 | |
| Variety | 5 |
The week has a fixed shape. Monday carries the first hard session and Thursday the second. The other 5 days are easy running that fills out whatever weekly mileage you've chosen inside the 56 to 70 range. The book lets you start the week on any day, so the Monday session can move to a weekend.
The hard sessions change as the weeks go by. The first 3 weeks pair a long run set by time with threshold repeats. Marathon-pace running arrives in week 4 and 1-kilometer repeats near 5K effort in week 5. From then on, the two days rotate through long runs, marathon-pace blocks, threshold sessions and repeats. Your paces come from a recent race through the book's tables, and the plan steps them toward your goal in 3 stages of 6 weeks: a touch slower than goal at first, closer in the middle, at goal for the last 6 weeks. Race week trims back to shorter easy runs, with one short threshold session on Wednesday.
Start it once you've held 50 miles a week or more for at least 2 months.
Six weeks to go
Here is week 13, tied for the most hard running in the plan.
MONDAY is the long session, 17 miles in all. After 3 easy miles, you run 12 straight at marathon pace, then 2 easy miles to finish.
TUESDAY is an easy run of about an hour.
WEDNESDAY is easy again, about an hour.
THURSDAY is the second hard day. After 40 minutes of easy running, you run 4 repeats of 2 miles at threshold, a strong effort you could keep up for roughly an hour, with 2 minutes of rest after each. Then come 2 single miles at the same effort with a minute's rest, and an easy mile to close.
FRIDAY is easy.
SATURDAY is easy.
SUNDAY is easy.
Seven runs, then, with no day off. The two hard days carry the training, and the 5 easy days fill out the rest of your week's mileage.
Monday is the session runners remember. The first few miles at marathon pace feel almost too easy, and that's the trap. By the middle the pace takes attention, and by the last few miles it takes all of it. Twelve unbroken miles teaches what the middle of a marathon asks: holding a rhythm long after it has stopped feeling fresh. Thursday is a different kind of work. Each 2-mile repeat sits at a strong, controlled effort, and the 2-minute rests are short enough that you start the next one still breathing hard. Ten miles of that is a lot of threshold running for one day.
The run that decides the week is Tuesday's. It's an hour of easy running the day after 12 miles at marathon pace, and your legs will want to go faster than they should, just to feel normal again. Let them go slow. Thursday depends on what you leave out on Tuesday and Wednesday. If those two days drift into a medium effort, Thursday turns into survival, and the best session of the week only adds to the tiredness.
Watch for the signs that the week is too much: repeats that get harder to hold from one Thursday to the next, or easy days that never feel easy. Daniels lets you swap an easy day for rest now and then, and a week like this is when to do it.
Does it build you up smartly?
Partly. The work comes in a sensible order, but the schedule explains little of it.
The order is the strong part. Threshold running comes first, while the long run stays modest, and marathon-pace work and faster repeats join only once that base is in. Every 6 weeks your paces move closer to goal. The schedule doesn't label these stages, but you feel them in what the hard days ask of you. Plans that shift their emphasis in stages like this tend to beat plans that hold one kind of training all the way through, though the edge the research finds is small.
The schedule also says less than it could. Each hard day lists its distances and efforts in the book's compact code, but most don't say what the session is for. That explanation sits in a separate chapter of the book on what each kind of run does.
Does it protect you from injury?
Runners at this mileage start with one advantage. Higher, steady weekly mileage tends to go with fewer injuries, not more, though the evidence is observational. Newer research points to the jump as the bigger danger: many injuries appear to start suddenly, often right after a single run well past your longest of the past month, rather than building up slowly over months.
This plan builds carefully in most of the ways that matter. Mileage climbs gradually from week to week, with one exception. The two hard days always have 2 or 3 easy days between them, so easy days can stay easy and hard days can stay hard. New kinds of session arrive one at a time, in ordinary weeks rather than big ones. And every hard day opens with easy running, so your legs are warm before the work starts.
But two protections are missing. The first is a lighter week. In Daniels' design, the easy days do the recovering. Five of them sit around the two hard sessions every week, run at an effort meant to add mileage without adding stress, and the book lets you take one as rest now and then. It's a coherent idea, and it keeps plenty of easy running between the hard days. But mileage dips only slightly in a couple of weeks, and the first real drop comes in race week. Coaching practice puts a lighter week every 3 to 5 weeks into most plans, because training that piles up with no relief tends to raise the risk of injury and illness, and a plan run without a coach needs that relief on the calendar. Easy days help, but they don't add up to a lighter week.
The missing break shows most in week 12, the exception above. That Monday is your first 20-mile run. Three days later, Thursday asks for 16 miles, with 8 at marathon pace and 4 more at threshold. It's the biggest single rise in the plan, and mileage alone undercounts weeks like this one, since faster running adds strain the miles don't show.
The second is strength. The book gives a full strength program in its own chapter, but none of it is on the schedule, so fitting it around 7 runs a week is left to you. It's worth the effort: strength training substantially lowers injury risk in sport, and about 2 sessions a week is enough for most runners to get its performance benefit as well.
But the book offers no guidance for the moment something starts to ache. Early evidence, not yet from runners, suggests a niggle that lingers between runs may raise the risk of a real injury. Here, the easiest fix is built into the week: when a heel or a knee is still talking to you the next day, let that day's easy run go. Five easy days a week leave room for it.
What happens when you miss a day?
Mostly, yes. A 7-day plan sounds rigid, but this one hinges on two days, and that makes it easier to bend than it looks.
Five of the seven runs are easy mileage, placed wherever they fit. Miss one and you've lost an hour of easy running, not a key session. Every run also tells you exactly how hard to go, with a label for the effort and a pace you look up from your race result, so the runs you do keep are the right ones. And when you lose more than a few days, the book has tables for coming back: how far to lower your paces, and how much running to start with.
But the schedule has little to say once a week goes wrong. The two hard sessions are numbered by priority, which suggests an order, but the book states no rule for what to cut when only one fits. Nor does it say how to reschedule the sessions from a lost week. And because all seven days already hold a run, moving Thursday's session means bumping an easy run, so the rebuilt week is yours to plan.
Will it get you ready for race day?
A marathon asks two things a shorter race barely touches: how long you can keep running, and how long you can hold a strong, steady effort. Early evidence links longer long runs with faster marathons, though no study has tested whether shorter, faster sessions could do the same job. For most recreational marathoners, marathon pace and threshold running are different kinds of training, and either is a reasonable way to prepare.
This plan trains both, and it does it with sessions few runners forget. Week 9 opens with an 18-mile long run. Three days later comes 16 miles with 12 straight at marathon pace. Week 13 repeats the 12-mile block inside a 17-mile run, this time at goal pace. The long run itself reaches 20 miles twice, in weeks 12 and 15. Sessions like these build the endurance to hold marathon pace when you're deep into a run, and they teach you what that pace feels like on legs that are already tired.
The long run has a ceiling set by the clock, and it's a tradeoff worth knowing. Each one is the shorter of a distance and a time, and the 20-milers stop at two and a half hours. The cap spares you very long hours on your feet. In exchange, if 20 miles takes you longer than that, your longest run will fall short of 20, and race day will take you several miles past anything you've covered in this build. Check what it means for you before you start.
Are the workouts varied enough?
Yes. Over 18 weeks you'll run long and easy, long with marathon-pace blocks, and 1-kilometer repeats near 5K effort, which in weeks 8 and 14 run straight into short fast repeats of 400 or 200 meters in the same session. Threshold alone comes in at least 6 shapes: mile repeats, 2-mile repeats, a ladder from 3 miles down to 1, and blocks at the end of a long run. Mixing clearly hard sessions with easy running may build endurance a little better than long stretches at a steady, moderately hard effort, and that's the mix here: about 83 percent of the running is easy.
Some sessions put the hard running where it's hardest to do. In week 12, 8 miles at marathon pace lead straight into threshold repeats. In weeks 5 and 11, you run hard, then an hour easy, then hard again. These teach you to hold good form and a strong effort once you're already tired, the skill the late miles of a marathon ask for.
The good & bad of training from a book
Daniels' Running Formula explains the training as well as prescribing it. Daniels coached SUNY Cortland's women to seven NCAA Division III cross-country titles and wrote the book there, and it teaches like a coach. Every run type comes with its purpose, and the paces come with the physiology behind them.
But running the plan means flipping between chapters. The weekly grid uses letter codes for every run. The paces sit in tables you read off your race result, and strength is in a later chapter still. Strides, which the book asks for on easy days, don't appear on the schedule at all. They take only a few minutes, and short, explosive efforts may help running economy, though strides themselves haven't been tested. Once you've learned the codes and looked up your paces, the grid reads cleanly, but that first sitting with the key and the tables is up to you.
Everything starts from that race result. Without a recent one, you have no paces to look up. His online pace calculator, used more than a million times a month in 2025, does the same lookup as the tables.
Is it right for you?
Run it. The plan asks for a run on all 7 days for 18 weeks, so the habit needs to be in place.
Run it. The book's tables turn that result into a pace for every kind of run here.
Run it. Two sessions carry 12 straight miles at marathon pace, the second at goal.
Look elsewhere. There's a run on all 7 days, every week, until the race.
Look elsewhere. No lighter week for 17 weeks, a heavy rise in week 12, and no strength on the schedule.
Think it over. The long runs stop at the clock, so your longest may fall short of 20.
A good alternative with an app
If the two-hard-days idea is what draws you to Daniels, Buena Vida offers its members a plan with the same shape: 18 weeks, two hard weekdays, and easy running everywhere else, with long runs mostly at a pace you can talk at. It peaks lower, near 60 miles a week, and trains by effort rather than by paces from a table.
Closest matchWhy this plan scores higher
- A lighter week every fourth week through the build, so relief comes on a schedule, not only when you notice you need it
- Every hard session written out with a warm-up, a cool-down and a note on what it's for
- A day with no running every week, so you run 6 days instead of 7
- Strides on an easy run most weeks, short fast pickups that don't add a hard day
- Long runs set by distance, building to 22 miles about a month before the race
- Strength sessions on your calendar every Friday until race week
What the app adds
- No complicated lookup tables. Each day's workout is clear and easy to follow
- Paces worked out from your own fitness, and adjusted automatically as you get stronger
- Miss a run, move a run, and the plan carries on
- Voice coaching through every workout, and runs recorded from your iPhone, Apple Watch, or Garmin
Get more out of your running with Buena Vida
Buena Vida was built by a runner to bring the whole job of training into one place: a plan that fits your schedule and your fitness, coaching on every run, and food targets that keep up with the work you do. Members get personal training & nutrition plans, plus full access to the catalog of pre-written plans for every running goal.
In research studies, runners on plans fit to them improved as much as or more than runners on fixed plans, and fewer of them stalled.
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More plans like this
Each of these plans takes its own route to race day. Effort-based plans, like the Buena Vida plan above, set your hard sessions by feel, so you learn what 10K effort and tempo feel like, and your training paces grow with you as you get stronger. Time-goal plans set every pace from the finish time you're aiming for. Others trade days, weeks, or mileage to fit your life.
Frequently asked questions
- What does 2Q mean in the Daniels marathon plan?
- The Q days are the week's hard sessions, and 2Q means there are two of them, Q1 and Q2, numbered by priority. The numbering suggests which matters more, but the book gives no rule for what to cut. Everything else in the week is easy running.
- Do I need the book to run the Daniels 2Q marathon plan?
- Yes. Each run on the schedule is a letter code, and only the tables in Daniels' Running Formula turn that code and a recent race time into a pace. The book also holds the strength program.
- What is VDOT in the Daniels plan?
- VDOT is a single fitness number that Daniels' tables assign to a recent race result. Find your number, and the same tables give your pace for every kind of run in the plan, from easy days to the fastest repeats. A faster race gives a higher number and faster paces.
- How long is the longest run in the Daniels 2Q marathon plan?
- 20 miles or two and a half hours, whichever comes first. You run it twice, in weeks 12 and 15. If 20 miles takes you longer than two and a half hours, your longest run will be shorter.
- Does the Daniels 2Q marathon plan include strength training?
- The book has a strength program in its own chapter, but none of it appears on the schedule. Fitting it around 7 runs a week is up to you.
- Does the Daniels 2Q marathon plan have recovery weeks or a taper?
- There is no lighter week until race week. Mileage eases over the last 3 weeks before the race and drops sharply in race week itself.
- What happens if I miss a week of the Daniels plan?
- Nothing on the schedule covers it. The two hard sessions are numbered by priority, which suggests an order, but the book states no rule for what to cut, so rebuilding the week around the gap falls to you.
- Is the Daniels 2Q marathon plan a good plan?
- For the right runner, yes. Its two hard days are long, specific marathon training, the easy days stay easy, and every pace comes from your own race. It falls short on recovery: no lighter week for 17 weeks, a heavy rise in week 12, and no strength sessions on the calendar.
Research notes
- Shifting training emphasis beats unchanging training
- Consistent mileage is linked to fewer injuries
- Many running injuries start suddenly
- Keep easy days easy, hard days hard
- Fixed plans need built-in lighter weeks
- Mileage alone doesn't measure your load
- Strength training lowers injury risk
- Two strength sessions a week is enough
- Niggles often warn of a bigger injury
- Longer long runs go with faster marathons
- Recreational marathon pace sits below threshold
- Mix easy and hard instead of steady medium
- Explosive work can make you more efficient