Running Plan Review Arthur Lydiard Marathon for Beginners

Does it build you up smartly?

A plan for a long race needs an order: build the engine, then teach it to go harder, then sharpen it. Training arranged in blocks like this tends to race better than training that never changes its emphasis. Inside that order, it also needs steps back, because a lighter week is when the body absorbs the work that came before it.

Lydiard's phases are the strongest part of this plan. He tested the order on himself and used it with Olympic medallists: a long aerobic base first, then hills, then harder running, then sharpening for the race. Each phase hands the next a runner ready for it. Through the hill and anaerobic phases, a long Sunday run keeps going, so the endurance from the base doesn't slip away while the harder work comes in.

The daily run is part of the method too. Lydiard ran seven days a week himself from 1949, and in his plans the give comes from the jog days and the time ranges, not from days off. But for a first marathoner, that leaves almost no step back. The only lighter weeks are 21 and 23, after the hardest work is done. Weeks 7 and 11 run fewer minutes, but they bring new kinds of hard running, so they aren't lighter weeks in the sense that matters, since minutes and miles don't capture all of the load. And tendons adapt more slowly than muscle and metabolism do, so you'll feel ready for more long before your legs are.

The sessions themselves are thin on the page, too. A fartlek day is just a length of time, and so is a hill day. How hard to go, how long to rest, and what the session is for are all in the book, or left to your own judgment.

Does it protect you from injury?

Poorly. For a first marathoner, this is the part of the plan to weigh most carefully.

Running injuries often seem to start suddenly, set off by a training error in the week before. Sharp jumps in weekly running raise injury risk, and lighter weeks give the body a chance to catch up before the next one.

This plan's jumps come with no step back before them. Week 5 lengthens the weekday jogs and the Sunday run, week 16 doubles Saturday's time trial to 10 km, and week 20 brings the 35 km trial, by far the biggest. For a beginner, it's an odd mix: the gentlest possible start, a month of nothing but jogging, and then the least protection right where a new runner is weakest. Bone is the slowest tissue to catch up with running, taking months, and tendons aren't much quicker.

Hard days also crowd together. In the hill weeks, you climb on Monday, Thursday and Saturday, with a fartlek on Wednesday between them. Six times across the plan, one hard day runs straight into another.

Strength isn't scheduled either. The book mentions weight training only with expert guidance, and the calendar holds none. For a first marathon, that's a gap: strength training lowers sport injury risk more than stretching does.

The book has a chapter on injuries and some guidance on warning signs, but no clear steps for what to do when one shows up. An ache that hangs around between runs appears to raise the risk of an injury that stops you training, so it deserves attention early. The time ranges give you room to run less while it settles.

What happens when you miss a day?

A plan shows how flexible it is in the week something goes wrong.

Lydiard built in more give than a seven-day calendar suggests. Many of the jogs and most of the aerobic and long runs come as a range of minutes, and the book lets you choose within it by feel, ease off when your legs are tired, and stop repetitions when your body has had enough. Nothing is set by pace, so there are no numbers to hit and none to fall behind on. A tired day can simply become a shorter one.

But the plan offers little once a run is actually missed. The book's setback advice is to ease off for a few days. It has no rule for a lost week, and it doesn't say which runs matter most, so deciding what to keep falls to you, on a calendar with no free day to move anything into. If something has to go, keep the Sunday long run, and let a short jog be the first to drop.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Mostly, yes. The plan builds the right amount of running for a first marathon, and one session shows you what most of the distance feels like before race day.

Peak weekly running suits a first marathon, and race-focused work begins in week 7 and continues to race day. The session that stands out is the 35 km time trial, four weeks out: most of the marathon at one even effort, which is the skill race day asks of you. Long runs are essential marathon preparation, and shorter, harder sessions can't stand in for them.

But that trial is the only run of its kind. Sunday's long run reaches 2 hours in week 7 and goes no further through week 18, so the step up to 35 km comes in one go. If the trial goes badly, there's no second one to learn from.

The taper is the second gap. Week 21 eases off, then week 22 climbs back with a 10 km time trial and a Sunday run of up to 2 hours, so the real step down toward the race starts only in week 23. A taper of 1 to 3 weeks improves race performance, and here the running settles into one late.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Runners improve most on a spread of hard sessions set against plenty of easy running, rather than long stretches of one moderate effort.

Lydiard's plan has range. Over 24 weeks you'll jog, run steady aerobic runs, run fartlek, bound up hills and steps, run repetitions, sprint, and race time trials. Strides turn up most weeks from week 7, sprints join in the final phase, and short, fast efforts like these make running more efficient. Easy running makes up about 70 percent of the total.

But the variety changes from phase to phase, not from week to week. Weeks 7 to 10 are the same week four times over, and so are weeks 11 to 14. From week 15, time trials take over, twice in most weeks. They teach you to judge an even effort, and that practice may help your pacing. But tune-up races and time trials haven't been shown to make marathon times faster, and in a plan written for beginners, they fill a large share of the last ten weeks.