Running Plan Review Hal Higdon Pool Running

Does it build you up smartly?

A comeback plan has two jobs. The first is to hold onto your fitness while you heal. The second is to bring impact back slowly enough that the injury doesn't return. A good one builds in steps, and it gives your body lighter weeks along the way, since it's during the lighter weeks that training turns into fitness.

The plan's shape is a handover from water to land. Your total training time runs from a little under 2 hours in week 1 to 3 hours in week 8, and sits between 2 hours and about 2 hours 40 in most weeks between. What changes most is how much of that time lands on your legs. The water carries nearly all of it at first, then the road takes over, a session at a time.

The first half does its job well. Four weeks in the pool give you a routine you can follow without thinking: 5 sessions a week, each one a kind of workout and a length of time. The Sunday deep-water run builds by 10 minutes a week, from 30 to 60, with swimming and shallow-water days around it.

But the return to land is built on the calendar. Running arrives in week 5, and even with the book's advice to wait until you've recovered, the land weeks that follow grow every week with no lighter week anywhere in them. That's the plan's weak point. The return to running is the stretch where an injured runner most needs a lighter week, and it doesn't have one.

Does it protect you from injury?

Not on the way back, and for an injured runner, that's the part that counts.

The water half is gentle on your legs by design. Every run on land is easy, and there are no hard sessions at all. The trouble is how fast the running returns.

Fitness comes back on a staggered clock. Your metabolism and blood volume respond within days to weeks, while your tendons and bones take weeks to months to rebuild. The book's chapter on water training makes the case that deep-water running is close enough to the real thing to stand in for it while you heal. But apart from the odd shallow-water session, a month in the pool gives your tendons and bones very little impact to adapt to.

That's what makes the last week the riskiest part of the plan. Your time on land jumps from 90 minutes to 150, more than twice the average of the 3 weeks before it, and the Sunday run reaches an hour. Sharp jumps like that are a well-known path to injury, and many injuries start suddenly, often in the week after a jump, rather than building slowly over months. For a runner coming back from one injury, it's the wrong place for the biggest step.

Strength training isn't on the schedule either. The book gives general advice on it, but none of it is on this schedule. A comeback is a good time to start, since strength training substantially lowers the risk of injury in sport, more than stretching or balance work alone. Here, choosing the exercises and finding the days for them falls to you.

The book does take injury seriously, with a chapter on avoiding it that covers the warning signs of overtraining. Read it before week 5. An injury sits on a sliding scale, from feeling fine to a low-grade ache to an injury that stops you, and an ache that comes back after a run means you've started back down it.

What happens when you miss a day?

The trap for a hurt runner is all or nothing: either the plan is on track, or the comeback has failed. A comeback plan needs to handle the space in between, the missed day and the shin that still aches in week 5.

Some of that is here. Monday and Friday are always open, so a missed session can slide a day. The book lets you swap days, and Higdon tells you to use whatever facilities you can get to, which helps when the deep end is closed or lane times change. His rule for missed days is not to miss two in a row.

But that rule is about as far as it goes. The schedule doesn't say which sessions matter most, so in a short week you can't tell whether to keep the Sunday hour in the pool or the swim. And if you're not ready to run by week 5, the book says stay in the pool, but nothing tells you how to fit those extra weeks in, whether to repeat week 4, or where to pick up once you're healed. That replanning is yours to do, week by week, on your own.

No session says how hard to work, either, and in the pool, where nothing pushes back, that's the guidance you'd want most.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Enough for a comeback. Every run is easy, which is the right call for the first weeks back, but the land weeks give you only one kind of run.

On land, each run is an easy one, set by time. Easy running is the base that everything else is built on, and the weeks after an injury aren't the time for hard sessions. The schedule is easy to read too: each day is one session and a number of minutes.

In the pool, you'll mix running in deep water, swimming, and running in shallow water. That helps the hours pass, and it spares your legs while you're healing.

But the plan leaves out the gentlest way to bring some speed back. Strides, short and relaxed bursts of faster running, appear in the book as part of a warm-up, but never on this schedule. Short, fast efforts like these make your running more efficient. Once the easy runs feel normal again, adding a few to the end of one is a small step that reminds your legs what quicker running feels like.