Running Plan Review Greg McMillan Marathon: Intermediate-Advanced (Combo)

Does it build you up smartly?

A marathon build needs two rhythms. Across the whole plan, the work should move from general fitness toward the race itself, and shifting the emphasis block by block leads to better races than training the same way throughout. Inside that, the weeks should rise and fall, so the body gets regular chances to absorb what came before.

McMillan gets both right. The early weeks sharpen speed with short repeats and build threshold with longer ones. Goal pace takes over in the middle weeks, and the last 3 weeks back off toward the race. From week 4, every other week is lighter, with less running and a shorter long run, so you're never more than a week from a breather. It's a generous rhythm, and lighter weeks are where hard training turns into fitness.

But the schedule doesn't tell you any of this. The phases have no names, and each day gives the prescription and nothing else: a time or a distance, a number of repeats. What Tuesday's surges are for, or why repeats of 1000 meters at threshold show up in week 3, is explained in the book's workout chapters, not on the page you train from. Read those chapters and the shape comes clear. Follow only the grid and the weeks read as a list.

Does it protect you from injury?

Mostly, once you're past the first week. The weekly pattern protects you. Tuesday and Thursday carry the hard work, with an easy Wednesday between them and an optional Friday after, so no two hard sessions ever land on consecutive days. And the load never spikes against what you've run in the weeks before. Sharp jumps in weekly running are where many injuries start, and through the build, this plan doesn't have any.

The book adds chapters on warning signs and how to respond, and it lets you take the low end of a range when you're tired, or move or skip a key workout on a bad day. That matters, because a small ache that won't clear seems to raise the odds of an injury that stops you running.

But week 1 is the exception. The book's entry bar for this plan is a long run of about 90 minutes, already a step up from its intermediate version, which asks for 60 to 75. Week 1 then asks for around 50 miles, if you run the middle of each range, with a Sunday long run of 14 to 20 miles that finishes with 4 to 6 miles at goal pace. For nearly every runner, even 14 miles takes well over 90 minutes. A plan's first week should match the running you already do, and tendons and bone adapt to new mileage more slowly than your heart and lungs. A runner who arrives at the minimum may feel fit enough for that Sunday. Their tendons and bones are the part that isn't ready.

Strength training is the other gap. The book includes a sample routine and points to a full program online, but no strength day appears on the calendar, so finding room for it in a week with 2 hard sessions, a long run and up to 7 runs falls to you. That's a real loss: strength training substantially lowers the risk of sport injury, more than stretching or balance work does. Warm-ups are a smaller version of the same gap. The book teaches them, but the hard sessions on the calendar don't include one.

What happens when you miss a day?

Less than you'd hope. The book helps you through a bad day, but not a bad week.

Nothing on the schedule says what to do after missed days: repeat the week, skip ahead, or fold the work into what's left. The book implies that the long run and the main midweek session count most, but it never ranks a week's runs, so a short week leaves you choosing alone what to keep. In a 12-week plan that weighs more than usual. One lost week is a twelfth of the build, and with the plan starting big, there's little slack at the front to absorb it.

The day-to-day guidance is good. Every run is an effort in one of McMillan's four training zones, and the book explains what each zone does, so you learn to judge a run by how it feels instead of by a number on your watch. The ranges give you room: 50 to 70 minutes, 16 to 20 miles. And Monday and Friday are already open, so a Tuesday or Thursday session that gets squeezed out has somewhere to go.

But the schedule stays as printed. Shift Thursday's session to Friday, and rebalancing the rest of the week, around a Sunday long run that doesn't move, is your job.

Will it get you ready for race day?

The marathon asks for legs that hold up for hours, and long runs are the one thing shorter, faster sessions can't replace. This plan will get you there if your body can carry its size, and that's the question to settle before you start.

The size is the gap. Taking the middle of each range, the biggest week comes to about 66 miles, and the long runs in weeks 7 and 9 are 22 to 26 and 22 to 28 miles. At the top of that last range, you'd run farther in training than in the race. That's more than the marathon requires of a runner at this level, and 12 weeks leaves little room to grow into it. It suits the runner who already lives close to these numbers, and asks a lot of anyone who doesn't.

What the plan builds for race day is good. The midweek goal-pace run grows from 6 to 8 miles in week 4 to 10 to 12 in week 9, and several Sunday long runs finish with 6 to 8 miles at goal pace. By race day, the pace you've chosen is one you've run for many miles. For most runners, marathon pace sits below threshold, so those miles teach rhythm more than they raise your ceiling. The tempo runs and threshold repeats do that, since threshold rises when you practice running at it. After the longest run, 3 weeks before race week, the running eases off, the kind of taper linked to faster racing than holding training steady.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. The hard days change almost every week, and so does the long run.

Tuesdays often bring one-minute surges with a minute of jogging after each. Thursdays rotate through short, fast repeats, repeats at threshold, tempo runs and runs at goal pace, and never repeat the same session two weeks in a row. Sundays move between steady long runs, long runs with surges, and long runs that finish at goal pace.

That mix is what McMillan's Combo label means: a runner balanced between speed and endurance gets both. It sits on a broad easy base, about 83 percent of the running, which carries the harder training and helps you absorb it. Keeping easy days easy and hard days clearly hard helps most distance runners improve more than a steady diet of medium efforts.