Running Plan Review Greg McMillan Marathon: Novice-Intermediate

Does it build you up smartly?

Mostly, yes. The plan follows a sound order, but the schedule never tells you what a workout is for.

Each day on the grid names the session and stops there. Week 1's Thursday is 6 to 8 uphill efforts of 60 to 75 seconds, jogging back down between them. It doesn't say what the climbs build, how hard they should feel, or that the book wants an easy warm-up first. The 2 blocks aren't labelled either, so nothing marks the turn in week 4 from building strength to rehearsing the race. The book explains all of it, and explains it well, in its chapter on workouts. But that chapter isn't on the page you run from.

The order underneath holds up. Hills and steady running come first, then the Thursday sessions turn toward the race, then 3 lighter weeks bring you to the start. Plans that shift their emphasis from block to block like this produce better races than training at one constant load. Lighter weeks also come at week 4 and again in weeks 10 and 11, the stretches where recent training settles in as fitness.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly. Hard days never fall back to back, and Monday is always a day off. But twice the plan piles new demands into a single week, and the strength work the book recommends isn't on the schedule.

Many running injuries start suddenly, often set off by a training error the week before, and a sharp rise in weekly running is a known trigger.

Week 5 is the first of those weeks. The long run reaches 16 to 18 miles for the first time, and the fast 800-meter repeats arrive for the first time too. Either one alone is a fair step. Together, they make week 5's training load, the distance plus the new hard work, nearly half again what the 3 weeks before it asked. Week 9 is the second: about 40% more running than week 8, with 10 miles at goal pace on Thursday and 18 to 20 on Sunday. Mileage alone undercounts a week like that, because miles at goal pace work your legs harder than easy miles do. For a runner one step past beginner, these are the weeks where a niggle turns into an injury.

The book helps you catch one. It gives whole chapters to warning signs and to recovering well. Read them before week 5. An ache that hangs on from one run to the next often comes before an injury that stops you running, and weeks 5 and 9 are when to listen for one.

Strength is the other gap. The book includes a sample routine and points to a full program online, but no strength session appears on the calendar, so fitting it around 4 to 6 running days is yours to work out. Regular strength training cuts sports-injury risk substantially, more than stretching does.

What happens when you miss a day?

A missed week costs more in a 12-week plan than in a longer one. There's less time to rebuild, and the long run keeps climbing whether you were there or not. This plan bends well inside a week, but it doesn't say what to do when you lose one.

There's no rule for a missed week: whether to repeat it, skip ahead, or pick up where the calendar says. The schedule doesn't rank its sessions either. Thursday and Sunday are plainly the key days, but if a busy week leaves room for only one, choosing which to keep is up to you.

Inside a week, there's plenty of give. Nearly every session is a range: 30 to 45 minutes, 6 to 8 hills, 16 to 18 miles. The book tells you to take the low end when you're tired, and to skip or move a key workout on a bad day rather than force it. It also allows a down week every fourth week, so if the build is wearing you down, you have the book's blessing to ease off.

Effort comes first in this book. Workouts are described by feel, in 4 zones McMillan adapted from David Martin, and the calculator turns a recent race into paces to check against. Zones tied to how your body responds are how research suggests intensity is best set. On a hilly route, you run the effort and let the pace go.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes. This plan rehearses the race from the first weekend.

No amount of shorter, faster work can stand in for the long run, and here it climbs steadily to 18 to 20 miles in week 9, 3 weeks before the race. That's far enough to make the last miles of the marathon less of a mystery, and early enough to recover from.

Goal pace shows up in 8 of the 11 training weeks, starting with the closing miles of the very first long run, then in Thursday blocks of 6, 8 and 10 miles, and at the end of many long runs after that. You learn the rhythm of race pace, and you learn it on legs that have already done some work. For most runners outside the front of the field, marathon pace sits below threshold, the effort where steady running tips into hard, so those miles mostly teach the race rather than raise your ceiling. The steady runs, tempo runs and mile repeats in weeks 2, 6, 10 and 11 do that job.

The final 3 weeks ease off, with race week the lightest of all. A taper of 1 to 3 weeks makes runners 2 to 6 percent faster on race day than holding the training steady.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. Thursday's workout never repeats from one week to the next.

Across 12 weeks you meet 6 kinds of hard session: hill repeats, steady and tempo runs, miles at goal pace, long runs that build in thirds, 800-meter repeats and mile repeats. Each one works on something a little different. Around 78% of the running stays easy, the base everything else rests on, and the 2 hard days of each week never fall back to back. Clear easy days and clear hard days serve most runners better than a steady stream of medium effort, and this plan keeps that line clean.