Running Plan Review Jack Daniels 2Q Marathon Training Plan, 71 to 85 Miles per Week

Does it build you up smartly?

A marathon build usually changes character as it goes. The early weeks lay down mileage, the middle weeks add the hard work the race will lean on, and the last weeks turn toward race effort before the miles come down. Plans that move through stages like this tend to race better than plans that hold one load from start to finish, though the gain is small.

Daniels takes a different route. He progresses the paces, not the sessions. The schedule starts you a little slower than the paces from your race and brings you up to them by week 13, so the same kinds of sessions get harder because you run them faster. It's a coherent idea, and the miles and long runs grow alongside it.

But the kind of work never changes. From week 3 to week 17, Monday and Thursday cycle through the same set of sessions in roughly the same mix, so what you do in week 4 is what you do in week 16.

The sessions also don't say much about why they're there. Each one gives you the distances at each effort, but a short stock note repeats across most of them, and the reasons live in the book. On the schedule alone, you know what to run and not what it's for.

Does it protect you from injury?

Mostly. The build is gradual, but the plan never gives your body a break from its heaviest days, and it leaves strength and warning signs to you.

The weekly climb is the good news. You start close to the mileage you already run, which is where most coaches would have a plan start. The biggest weekly rise, about a fifth into week 12, stays short of the very large weekly jumps that tend to raise injury risk. And higher, steady weekly running tends to go with fewer injuries, not more, though not every study agrees.

The load is heavier than the mileage looks, though. Weekly distance leaves out how hard those miles are, and this plan puts a lot into two days. In weeks 12 and 15, a 20-miler on Monday is followed by an 18-mile hard day on Thursday. Week 15 alone has 8 threshold miles on Monday and 10 more on Thursday. The second big day lands on legs still carrying the first, and with no lighter week in 17 weeks of building, that fatigue never fully clears. If you're moving up from one of the book's lower-mileage tiers, this is the part that will feel new. When a reader asked Daniels about running 85-plus miles a week instead of 70, he drew a line: "if feeling more tired or stressed as a result of increasing mileage, it is not the time to continue with that increase."

The only lighter week is race week. The miles dip now and then, but only because a shorter session happens to fall on Monday, not because the plan built in a break. That matters, because tiredness that keeps stacking with no lighter week to clear it tends to raise the odds of injury and illness.

Strength is left off the schedule entirely. The book has a detailed program, but where it fits around two long hard days, and what goes into each session, is your call. Skipping it costs more than it seems: strength training substantially lowers the risk of sports injuries. Marathoner Shalane Flanagan, who had few injuries in her career, put it down to one thing: "I attribute that to being as strong as possible."

Each hard session opens with easy running, which is a proper warm-up, but there are no drills or mobility work before the fast miles. And while the book has clear tables for coming back after time off, nothing on the schedule tells you what to watch for along the way. Many runners learn that a niggle, the small ache that lingers between runs, can be the start of an injury that stops them running. When one shows up, take the next easy day off or keep it short, before it becomes the reason you miss a week.

What happens when you miss a day?

The book teaches you how to run each session, not just what to run, and that does a lot of the work when a week goes sideways.

Each run comes with an effort you can feel as well as a pace you can look up. Threshold is "comfortably hard," the effort you could hold for about an hour of racing. The faster repeats sit near the effort you'd race 5K at. The tables in the book turn a race time into a precise pace for every kind of run, and if you race again mid-build, you can look up new paces and carry on. On a tired day, you can run by the effort and still get the session's point.

What to cut in a short week is implied rather than spelled out. Each week's two hard days are labeled first and second in priority, and the book allows an easy day to become a rest day now and then. So the sensible order is to protect Monday and Thursday and let an easy hour go. But no rule on the schedule says so.

Moving a single session is manageable. Five easy hours a week give you room to shift a hard day by a day, as long as you keep easy days between the hard ones. A missed week is harder. Nothing on the schedule says whether to repeat it, drop it, or fold its long day into the next one. That call is yours.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes. This is where the plan is at its best.

The marathon is long, and most runners find the long run is what carries them through the late miles. Longer long runs tend to go with faster finishes, though no one has checked whether shorter, faster sessions could do the same. This plan builds it from 90 minutes in week 1 to 18, 19, 20 and finally 21 miles in week 14, five weeks before the race. Dutch researchers who studied runners training for marathons reached a conclusion this plan follows: "For a fast marathon finish time, it therefore seems important to train with a high weekly training volume, but it does not seem necessary to include an endurance run of more than 35 km." That's about 22 miles. And the long run isn't the only long day. In several weeks, both hard days run 16 miles or more, so you get two runs a week that would each count as a long run on their own. Long hours on your feet become a regular part of the week.

It also trains both efforts the race depends on. Marathon-effort running shows up in 18-mile runs that carry 11 to 14 miles at race effort, and in week 10's 20-miler with 12. In week 17, two weeks out, you run 14 of 18 miles at race effort, which is as close to a dress rehearsal as training gets. Threshold work comes nearly every week, as repeats, as a descending ladder, and as sessions that put an hour of easy running between two threshold blocks, so the second block is run on tired legs. Week after week, you get a lot of time at that effort.

Then the miles come down. The last two weeks ease off from the peak, and race week drops to about 40 miles but keeps one short threshold session. A taper of up to three weeks improves race performance over training straight through to the start. Cutting back can still feel wrong. "The first marathon I had to taper, I felt like I was losing fitness," says Reid Coolsaet, a pro marathoner who once cut from about 125 miles a week to 55 before a race. "But the way I felt in the first part of that marathon, I realized that it worked."

Are the workouts varied enough?

Fast marathoners need a big aerobic engine, the ability to run close to their limit for a long time, and a stride that wastes little energy. Training usually gets at all of that by keeping most running easy and making a few days clearly hard, rather than settling into a steady middle effort. Runners who keep easy days easy and hard days hard tend to improve more.

This plan does that well. About 83 percent of the running is easy, and the 2 hard days never fall back to back. The hard days themselves change from week to week. One Thursday is a 4-3-2-1 ladder at threshold. Another is 1 km repeats near 5K effort, finished with short, fast 400s that leave your legs feeling quick. Across 18 weeks there are 10 different session formats, so each hard day asks something a little different of you.

One thing to add yourself: strides. The book asks for them on 2 or 3 easy days a week, but they're not on the schedule. A handful of short, relaxed bursts at the end of an easy hour takes a few minutes, and short, explosive efforts tend to help you use less energy at the same pace, though the research tested jumps and sprints rather than strides themselves.