Running Plan Review Jack Daniels Red Intermediate Plan

Does it build you up smartly?

Daniels builds this plan in clear chapters, and the book explains each one.

Every hard session is spelled out: how long to warm up, how many repeats, how much rest. The schedule itself says what a session is for only some of the time, but the book fills that in, with a chapter on what each kind of run does in your body. If you like a reason behind each hard day, you'll find one.

Holding the same week for a month is by design. Daniels' rule was to hold a level of training stress for 4 to 6 weeks before raising it. When readers asked on his coaching company's blog how often to raise their paces without a new race, Daniels answered "about every 4-6 weeks, but not more often." There's sense in it: your aerobic engine builds over weeks, with measurable gains appearing around four to six weeks in, so a phase that holds still gives each new kind of work time to take hold. It also makes for a fair comparison. The fourth Wednesday of a phase is the same workout as the first, and it should feel more under control.

Does it protect you from injury?

Mostly. The mileage is handled with care, but the plan never schedules an easier week, and the hard days arrive without strength work to back them up.

The weekly running climbs only a little, and the two hard days never fall back to back. But mileage misses the stress that pace and intensity add, and this plan's stress lives in its hard days. If your base is a habit of 30 minute easy runs, hard repeats twice a week from the first week are a real change in what your legs are asked to do. Your heart and lungs tend to answer harder running within a few weeks, while tendons take weeks to a few months to adjust, so the repeats can start to feel routine before your legs have fully caught up. Lorraine Moller, an Olympic marathon medalist from the Lydiard school, puts it as a rule: "you can never progress faster than your slowest part will allow." Week 9 brings two new kinds of hard workout at once, the short efforts and the continuous 3 mile run, but no easier week comes before it, so your legs meet both at full load.

There's no lighter week anywhere in the 16, and the plan finishes on its biggest weeks. Training load that builds without relief tends to raise the risk of injury and illness, and a runner on a fixed plan with no coach watching needs that relief written into the schedule. Running coach Pete Rea had his pro runners ease off every third week, and he found "the level of workouts is elevated thereafter." The mileage here stays nearly flat, but two hard sessions arrive every week from the first Wednesday to the last Friday, and no week lets them step aside.

Strength is missing from the calendar. The book asks for it in a chapter of its own, but the schedule leaves no day for it, and fitting it around a Wednesday and Friday that are already hard is up to you. That matters, because strength training substantially lowers sport injury risk. Marathon great Eliud Kipchoge wrote of his own training that "the gym work helps to chase away the injuries."

The book offers one safety rule: if in doubt, take the easier choice. But it never says what doubt feels like. Many runners notice that a small ache that lingers from one run to the next can turn into an injury that stops them, though the research on it is early. The optional days are the obvious place to give one room to settle.

What happens when you miss a day?

When one of the four set runs goes missing, the plan goes silent. Nothing says whether to move a lost hard day, drop it, or repeat the week. Moving Wednesday's session to Thursday puts two hard days back to back, and the schedule won't warn you. If you're sick or away for a week, nothing on the page shifts to match. The book has tables for easing back after longer time off, but the week to week reshuffling is left to you. For the runners Daniels coached himself, that reshuffling was his job. "Jack works hard to make the best plan for me," said 2012 Olympian Janet Cherobon-Bawcom.

Where the plan does bend is in its shape. Three of every seven runs are optional, so in a crowded week you can drop all three easy extras and still do every session that matters. The four that are set, the easy run with strides, the two hard days and the long run, are clearly the core. And the book's tables put a target on every kind of run, so how hard a workout should be is never a guess.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Every run should have a job, and on this plan every run does. For a runner whose weeks have been one easy run after another, this is the change they came for: three kinds of hard work over 16 weeks, each with a purpose the book explains.

On the steady days, at an effort you could hold for about an hour, you learn to stay with a hard pace you'd normally back off from. On the short, hard days near 5K race effort, you find your top gear for a few minutes at a time. The easy runs and the long run build the base underneath both. Mixing easy running with clearly hard sessions may build endurance a little better than long stretches at one medium effort, and trained runners may improve more when easy days and hard days are clearly separated. About 80 percent of this plan's running stays easy. Recreational runners often let easy runs creep up toward threshold effort, a trap that sport scientists Stephen Seiler and Espen Tønnessen called a training intensity "black hole."

Strides run through every week of the plan: after Monday's easy run, before the hard efforts in the later phases, and after the long run in the final month. They're over in a few minutes. Strides themselves haven't been tested directly, but short, explosive efforts can improve running economy, the energy each mile costs you.