Running Plan Review Hal Higdon Marathon: Advanced 1 (Heart Rate)

Does it build you up smartly?

The long run builds well, but the hard days hardly change from start to finish.

Look at the first three Thursdays: hills, then a tempo run, then 800-meter repeats. Now look at the last three before the taper: a tempo run, repeats, hills. The sessions get longer and the counts go up, but the kind of hard work stays the same all the way through. Strong marathon plans usually shift their focus as race day gets closer, moving from general fitness toward work that looks more like the race, and plans built that way tend to race better than plans that hold one kind of load throughout.

What the plan does build with care is the long run. After each 20-miler, the next week drops back to a 12-mile long run and lighter running overall, which gives your body a chance to absorb the work before the next big push. The half marathon in week 9 gives you a checkpoint halfway through.

The sessions also come with little explanation. Thursday names the count, the length of each climb or repeat, the recovery and the heart rate. It doesn't say how steep the hill should be, or what the session is meant to do for you. The book's speedwork chapter covers the why, but building a Thursday around it falls to you. A runner who has done hill repeats before won't mind. A runner who hasn't will be guessing at the hill.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly. The week itself is gentle on your body, but week 13 asks for a lot at once.

Many running injuries start suddenly, often in the week after a training jump, and sharp jumps in weekly running raise the risk. The steadier the build, the more time your tendons and bones have to keep up.

Higdon builds the week around the long run, which the book treats as the cornerstone, and lets little else compete with it. Thursday is the only hard day in most weeks, it never sits next to another hard day, and Friday is always off. Add the lighter weeks after each 20-miler, and the everyday rhythm of this plan is kind to your legs.

But the mileage moves in jumps, and week 13 is the sharpest. It comes straight after a lighter week and adds about 16 miles. Inside it is your first run at marathon pace, 10 miles on Saturday, and the next morning you run 20. That's a new kind of effort and your longest run back to back, in your second-biggest week. Go into that weekend rested, and if Saturday leaves you sore, shortening Sunday is the smarter call.

Strength training is missing too. The book encourages it but puts none of it on this schedule, and what each session holds is up to you. That's a real gap, because regular strength work lowers injury risk more than stretching does.

The book helps more than the schedule here. It has a chapter on avoiding injury, a chapter on pool running, and warning signs of overtraining. A low, lingering ache appears to raise the odds of an injury that stops you running, so watch for one through weeks 11 to 13, when the running is at its heaviest.

What happens when you miss a day?

When you lose a few days, the book gives you a simple rule but not much of a plan.

The rule is that one missed day is fine and two in a row is not. You can also swap days to fit your week, and Friday is the week's one empty day, so a run pushed off Thursday has somewhere to go. And because almost every run is set by heart rate rather than a pace, a run-down day doesn't leave you chasing a number on the clock.

But nothing on the page covers a lost week, or whether a missed 20-miler should be made up. It also doesn't rank the runs for a short week. The long run and Thursday matter most, and the book makes the long run the heart of the plan, but you have to piece that together yourself.

Understanding each run takes some reading too. The book explains long runs, speedwork and heart-rate training well, but in separate chapters, and before a given Thursday you may find yourself flipping between all three.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes. This is the plan's strongest area, and it covers what a marathon asks of you.

Long runs are the one thing marathon training can't do without, and this plan builds them steadily. You reach 16 miles in week 7, 19 in week 10, and 20 three times after that. The last 20 lands three weeks before race day, which leaves time to recover from it.

The tempo runs grow from 30 to 45 minutes across the build. Threshold fitness is specific to the effort you train it at, and these runs are where you practice it. The week 9 half marathon gives you a full race in the middle of the plan and a check on your marathon goal, and races like it may help most by teaching you to pace yourself.

Week 13's Saturday is the plan's only run at marathon pace: 10 miles at the speed you plan to race. It's your one long look at how race day should feel.

Then the plan backs off. Over the last few weeks the long runs drop from 20 to 12 to 8, and race week holds a few short runs at low heart rates, including a set of 400-meter repeats at just 60 percent. A taper of 1 to 3 weeks improves race performance, and this one is well shaped.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Mostly. The mix is right, but you get one hard session in most weeks.

Most of your mileage is easy. The Mondays, Wednesdays and long runs sit at heart rates where you could hold a conversation, and the hard days are clearly hard. That split is the one that tends to work. Runners improve more when easy days stay easy and hard days stay hard than when everything drifts to the middle.

Across the 18 weeks you get hills, tempo runs, 800-meter repeats, a half marathon, a marathon-pace run, and short repeats in race week. Each works your running in a slightly different way, and around 85 percent of your mileage stays easy.

But Thursday carries most of that variety by itself, and hills show up just 5 times. There are no strides on the easy days either. Strides are a handful of quick, smooth pickups of about 20 seconds, and short fast efforts like these make runners more efficient. A few at the end of a Monday or Wednesday run is an easy addition, but you'd be adding it yourself.