Running Plan Review Jack Daniels 800-Meter Training Plan, 40 Miles per Week

Does it build you up smartly?

Good training comes in phases, each one building on the last, and planned shifts in what the training emphasizes tend to work better than training that never changes. Daniels' order suits the 800 well. Six weeks of easy running and strides come before any fast repeats. The fast repeats then come before the longest hard intervals, so you learn to run quickly and relaxed before you're asked to run quickly and tired.

The sessions are nearly as good. Most hard sessions come with a short note on what they train, so you rarely wonder why a run is there. But the steady runs at about marathon effort in the first phase are written more thinly than the rest. The 50-minute runs at that effort in weeks 4 and 6 come with no easy warm-up written in, and a few other sessions carry no note on what they train. Add 10 or 15 minutes of easy running before those steady runs, and they match the rest of the schedule.

Does it protect you from injury?

Mostly well. Many running injuries start suddenly, often right after a single run that goes well past your longest of the past month. This plan steers clear of that kind of jump. The weekly running rarely climbs steeply. Each new kind of hard session arrives in an ordinary week rather than a big one. And no two hard days ever fall back to back, so each one has at least a day of easy running before the next.

But an 800 plan asks for a lot of fast running, and from week 7 on, the weekly running holds about level while the kind of work changes around it. Level isn't the same as rested. Load that keeps building with no relief tends to raise the odds of injury and illness, which is why a fixed plan usually schedules a lighter week every few weeks. The one lighter week here, week 18, trims the miles but still carries 3 hard sessions, including 5 repeats of 1200 meters and the 600 plus 200 set.

That matters most for your tendons. Fitness in your blood and muscles tends to arrive within weeks, while tendons usually need weeks to a few months to catch up, so your lungs may feel ready for the repeats long before your Achilles and calves are. Many runners notice that a lingering niggle can be the first step toward an injury that stops them running, though the research on it is early, and the plan never names one as a reason to back off.

Strength is the other gap. The book covers it in chapter 15, but none of it is on the schedule, so choosing the days and building the sessions around 3 hard days falls to you. That's a real loss, because strength training substantially lowers injury risk in sport, and it makes trained runners more efficient as well.

What happens when you miss a day?

Better than you'd expect from a printed schedule.

Every week ranks its 3 key sessions in order of importance, and the plan is plain about how to use that: when a week goes sideways, protect the top session and let the third go first. The 4 easy hours are marked optional, so a busy day costs you some easy mileage, not a key workout.

The pacing bends with you too. One race result gives you a target for every session, and when you race faster, the tables give you new ones. A track season usually brings races every few weeks, so your paces can keep up with your fitness.

But the schedule says nothing about a missed week. If a cold takes out 5 days, you won't find a rule for whether to repeat the week, skip ahead, or slide everything back. The book has guidance for coming back after longer time off, but for the ordinary disrupted week, you're the one doing the replanning.

Will it get you ready for race day?

An 800 is short, but it isn't a sprint. It asks for two things: speed, and the strength to keep running well through the second lap while your legs tighten. The plan trains both.

The speed side comes from 3 phases of fast repeats at about mile race effort or quicker. The aerobic side comes from the 5K effort intervals of the third phase and the threshold running of the fourth, the effort you could hold for about an hour. Here that threshold running comes every week of the final phase. One set in the third phase stands out: 600 meters, 30 seconds of rest, then 200 meters, three times over. It's the race cut into two pieces, and it teaches you what the last half lap feels like.

The taper is the plan's tradeoff. Race week trims the running by only about a quarter, and the 2 weeks before it are no lighter than the rest, so you keep training close to full right up to the race. Easing off for up to 3 weeks before a goal race, with the running cut by roughly 40 to 60 percent, improves race performance. In a season with other races, pick the one you care about and ease back more in the 2 weeks before it.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. The hard days change shape almost every week.

Within a single phase you might run a ladder of fast repeats one Saturday, 2 to 4 minute hard efforts the next Thursday, and a steady threshold run the Monday after. Each works a different part of your racing. Around them, nearly all your running is easy hours. That split is a sound one: keeping easy days easy and hard days clearly hard tends to help trained runners improve more than a steady diet of medium effort.

The second phase's fast repeats are aimed at running economy, the energy you spend to hold a given speed. That's a sensible aim for a runner who already has a base under them. Strides back that up from the first week to the last, on easy days and after long runs, and quick, explosive work like this tends to make runners more economical, though strides on their own haven't been tested directly.