Running Plan Review Jack Daniels 2Q Marathon Training Plan, Up to 40 Miles per Week

Does it build you up smartly?

Partly. The training comes in a sensible order, but you're left to work out where one stage ends and the next begins.

The stages are well ordered, even though the plan never names them. Threshold work and long easy runs come first, faster efforts join next, and marathon-pace running takes the lead in the second half. Plans built in stages like this tend to beat plans that hold one load all the way through, though the gain is small. Asked which part of his training mattered most, New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard always answered simply, "Everything." Then he'd often ask, "Who would want to eat a cake half-baked?"

The key days show the build. Through week 3 they're modest: a long easy run and a short session of hard work. From week 7 on, most of them run 10 miles or longer, and both carry real work. But nothing on the schedule marks the change or says what the new stage is for, so matching the book's chapters on each kind of run to the weeks is your job.

Does it protect you from injury?

Injury risk tends to rise when the training load jumps, and it shows most clearly when one run goes well past your longest of the past month, with very large weekly jumps a warning sign too. This plan's biggest jump comes in week 7, with a second, smaller one in week 15.

The first jump comes in week 7, when marathon-pace running appears for the first time. Your running is already up from week 6, and now one key day holds 8 miles at marathon pace while the other has 4 at threshold effort. Taken together, that week's load is about half again what your legs have been handling. The miles alone undersell it, because faster running adds stress that distance doesn't show. And blood and muscle energy systems usually adapt within a few weeks, while tendons need weeks to a few months, so your legs can still be catching up after your breathing has settled. Olympic marathon medalist Lorraine Moller calls it her golden rule: "you can never progress faster than your slowest part will allow."

The second jump comes in week 15, when your running climbs by about a fifth into the plan's longest easy run. The biggest week of the plan follows straight after it.

What the plan lacks is a pause. There's no lighter week until the last 2 before the race. The mileage rises and dips a little as the key days change length, but no week is set aside to recover. From week 7 on, you meet those big key days one after another, for 10 weeks straight. Most coaches build in a lighter week every third or fourth week, because training that piles up with no relief tends to bring more injuries and illness. This plan saves all its easing for the end.

Strength training is the other gap. The book asks for it, in chapter 15, but the schedule leaves it out, so finding the days and building the sessions falls to you. Two key days that run long make that harder to fit, and strength work is a first-line way to cut injury risk in sport.

The same chapter has tables for returning after time off, by how long you've missed. They help once you've stopped running. Before that point, the plan gives you no warning signs to watch for. An ache that's still there at the start of the next run is one, and early research hints that a lingering niggle can come before an injury that stops you. In this plan, that's the day to trim an easy run or two, not to hold on to the schedule.

The plan gets one thing right throughout: the 2 hard days never fall back to back, and each hard session opens with easy running before the work starts.

What happens when you miss a day?

The 5 easy days give this plan its give. The plan says you can run as much or as little on them as your schedule allows, so a hectic week costs you easy miles rather than training. The two key days carry the weight. The schedule doesn't spell out what to drop first in a short week, but the shape of the week points that way: keep the key days, trim the rest.

Your paces are the most precise part of the plan. Every run has a target effort and a pace from the book's tables. To start, you need a recent race to look them up. A new race along the way updates them.

The harder moments come in the back half. Once both key days run long, a lost day has nowhere easy to go. Move week 13's 16-mile marathon-pace run from Sunday to Monday, and only one easy day stands between it and Wednesday's threshold work. The schedule says nothing about a missed key day or a missed week, so you make that call yourself: drop the session, swap it for an easy run, or move the week back. None of those means making up the lost miles. "So many runners say, 'I missed two weeks of training because of this injury, so I've gotta work extra hard when I come back to make up for what I lost,'" Daniels once told a room of runners. "No, you don't, because you're not as fit as you were before, so you don't have to train as hard to improve."

Will it get you ready for race day?

A marathon plan has to build two things: the mileage to carry you 26.2 miles, and the familiarity with race effort to hold it. This one builds the second very well and the first unevenly. Partly ready, then, with 2 gaps to plan around.

The first is the mileage. The plan is named for runners who run up to 40 miles a week, but it writes each easy day as an hour. Run all 5 as written, and your biggest week, 3 weeks before the race, comes to about 58 miles. That's a lot more running than the name promises. Keep that week near 40 instead, and the 5 easy days have to share about 11 miles, because the 2 key days come to 17 and 12. Either way, you'll have to adjust the schedule. Cutting back toward 40 fits Daniels' own rule, which running writer Amby Burfoot says he "repeated over and over again": "The goal of training is to obtain the best results possible with the least amount of work."

The second is the long easy run. It grows from about an hour in week 1 to two and a half hours in week 15, then stops. Coaches treat long runs as hard to replace in marathon training, since longer long runs go with faster marathons, though no study has tried swapping them for shorter work. In this plan the marathon-pace days do much of that work. In week 12, a long easy run of 130 to 150 minutes is followed three days later by 15 miles with 10 at marathon pace. Your longest day, in week 16, is 17 miles with 14 at marathon pace. Those are hard rehearsals, and a different thing from long, slow time on your feet.

The race-specific running is the plan's best feature. From week 7 to week 13, nearly every week holds a long stretch at marathon pace, building to 12 miles in one go, and week 16 puts 14 miles into one day. That's a lot of practice at that effort, including on tired legs.

Then the last 2 weeks ease off, with short, easy days in race week. A taper of up to 3 weeks improves race performance, and after week 16, you'll need it.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. The hard days change shape all the way through, and each shape has a reason.

About 85 percent of the running is easy, and the hard work comes in 10 different formats. Threshold repeats build the effort you can hold for an hour. Three-minute efforts at around your 5K race effort push your aerobic ceiling. Long runs at marathon pace teach you the race. That mix fits where the research usually points: keep easy days easy and hard days clearly hard, and mix mostly easy running with a few clearly hard sessions rather than settling into one medium effort. That middle is where many runners get stuck. "Many recreational runners feel like they must go hard every time, so they do a lot of training in this threshold area," says sports scientist Stephen Seiler, who studies how endurance athletes train. "They'll improve initially, but then they stagnate."

Strides fit easily on top. These are short, relaxed bursts of speed near the end of an easy run, 2 or 3 times a week, and a cheap way to practice running fast. Short, explosive efforts can improve running economy, though strides themselves haven't been tested.