Running Plan Review Greg McMillan Half Marathon: Intermediate (Speedster)

Does it build you up smartly?

A half marathon plan has two jobs, in order. First it builds legs and lungs that can take hard work. Then it teaches you to hold a strong effort for well over an hour. Plans that change their focus in stages like this produce better races than training that never shifts its emphasis.

This plan has the stages, but it rarely tells you so. Nothing on the schedule names a phase or says what a session is for. Week 1's Thursday reads 6 to 8 hill repeats of 60 to 75 seconds with a jog back down, and that's all it says. The reasons are in the book, in the chapter that explains each kind of workout. A runner who reads it will know why hills come first. A runner who only follows the schedule won't.

The plan also gives you one clear lighter week, in week 10, right after the biggest week. Week 4 eases off a little, with a shorter long run, but not by much. The book says you can take a down week every fourth week, but the schedule doesn't print one, and lighter weeks are when built up fatigue clears and the training sets in. Followed as written, that's 9 weeks of building before the first real break.

The order itself is sound. Hills first build strength before any fast repeats arrive. Steady threshold work comes next, then faster repeats, then race pace, then a light race week. For a Speedster, that order spends most of the hard days on what tends to fail late in a race, and very little on the speed you already have.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly. The hard days never fall back to back, but two weeks add load fast, and strength work is left off the calendar.

Sharp jumps in weekly running raise injury risk, and many injuries that look like slow wear and tear may actually start suddenly, often set off by a training error the week before. So the weeks to watch are the jumps.

The first is week 5, when the running rises by more than a quarter and the first long fast repeats arrive: 4 to 6 repeats of 1600 meters. The second, week 7, is the bigger change. The running rises by about a quarter again, and the week goes from one hard day to three: a Tuesday fartlek, Thursday repeats of 1200 meters, and a Sunday long run that finishes at goal pace. Mileage alone undersells a week like that, because fast running adds strain the miles don't show. Week 9 brings three hard days again.

This is where a Speedster gets into trouble. Tuesday's surges, Thursday's repeats and Sunday's fast finish are the three sessions a quick runner enjoys most, and each one invites you to run it a little harder than asked. Do that three times in one week, with no clear lighter week behind you, and the week costs far more than it looks on paper. In weeks 7 and 9, run every hard session at the effort the book asks for and no faster, and keep the runs between them truly easy. Those easy days are what make the other three possible.

Strength work is missing from the schedule too. McMillan gives a sample routine in the book and a full program online, but none of it is on the calendar, so when to fit it around Thursday and Sunday is up to you. It's worth the trouble, because strength training substantially lowers injury risk in sport.

The book does cover warning signs and what to do about them, so read that part before week 5. A niggle that lingers from one run to the next appears to raise the odds of a real injury. A small ache that's still there on Saturday of week 7 or 9 is a good reason to drop Sunday's fast finish and run the whole thing easy.

What happens when you miss a day?

Twelve weeks is long enough for something to go wrong. What helps then is knowing which runs to protect and how to pick the plan back up.

The book gives you less help with that than it could. Lose most of week 7, and the schedule won't say whether to repeat it or move on to week 8. The book implies the long run and the Thursday session matter most, but it never puts the week's runs in an order to cut, so that replanning falls to you. If a short week forces a choice, keep the Sunday long run. For a Speedster, it's the run that trains the weaker side.

The schedule itself, though, has plenty of room. Monday is always free, and in most weeks the two optional days give you somewhere to move a run. A lost day rarely means a lost session, and the book allows moving or skipping a key workout on a bad day.

The way the plan sets effort helps too. Most sessions come as an effort and a range, built on four training zones McMillan adapted from his mentor David Martin. Zones tied to real thresholds in the body are a sounder way to set effort than simple percentage formulas. And the book's rule for a tired day is simple: take the low end of the range.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes. This is the plan's strongest part.

A Speedster's half rarely comes undone because of how fast they can run fresh. It comes undone around mile 10, when they find out how much of that speed is left. What decides it is threshold, the hardest effort you can hold steadily before fatigue starts to pile up fast, and half marathon effort sits just below it. Threshold rises when you train at it, at that pace and in that activity, and nearly every week here has some of that work.

From week 7, the practice gets specific. Weeks 8 and 11 bring 3 repeats of 2 miles at goal pace. Weeks 7, 9 and 11 end the Sunday long run with 2 to 4 miles at goal pace, so you meet race effort when your legs are already tired, which is exactly the moment a Speedster needs to know it.

The long run covers the distance. It grows from 75 to 90 minutes in week 1 to 12 to 14 easy miles in weeks 8 and 10, so by race day you've run close to the full distance, or past it. The biggest week, a little under 40 miles, suits a half at this level.

Race week drops to well under half of the peak week's running, with one short set of steady repeats on Wednesday to keep your legs awake. A taper of 1 to 3 weeks before a goal race improves performance compared with training straight through, and this one lets you arrive fresh.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Faster racing comes from training different abilities in different ways, with plenty of easy running in between. Mixing clearly hard sessions with easy running builds endurance better than steady, moderately hard miles, and keeping easy days truly easy is what makes the hard ones work.

This plan mixes them well. The Thursday session changes almost every week, from hill repeats to steady 1000 meter repeats, longer fast repeats, a tempo run and repeats at goal pace, and two Tuesdays add a fartlek. Most of those sessions come back once, a few weeks later. The 1600 meter repeats of week 5 return in week 9, so you can feel what four weeks of training changed.

For a plan named after speed, there's little short, fast running in it: hill repeats in the first 3 weeks, the surges in two fartleks, and no strides on the calendar. The name describes the runner, not the training. The plan takes your speed as given and spends its variety on holding it.

Around all of it, 84 percent of the running stays easy. That easy running is the base that carries the hard work, and since no hard day ever follows another, you reach each one on fresh legs.