Running Plan Review Nike Run Club Marathon Training Plan

Does it build you up smartly?

Less than the labels suggest. The phases have names, but the kind of hard work stays much the same from start to finish, and the sessions are only partly written out.

You can see the shape on the calendar. Base, Build and Peak are labelled, and the hard sessions change with them. Base is short repeats, a fartlek (alternating hard and easy running by the minute) and hills. Build is tempo runs and longer repeats. Peak mixes efforts from mile speed to 10K effort while the long run reaches 22 miles.

But the names change more than the effort does. From week 1 to the taper, the hard day asks for tempo effort or faster, and the Peak weeks never turn toward the marathon itself. Training tends to work better when its focus shifts over time, and world-class coaches move toward race-specific work as the race nears. "We start with general training and progress to more intensive and specific training," one of them told researchers studying Norway's top coaches. Here, the hard days in the last weeks of Peak ask for the same range of efforts as the ones in Base.

Each hard session starts with a warm-up and spells out the repeats and the recovery between them. But all but one end without a cool-down, and the written schedule doesn't say what a session builds, or how it should feel when it goes well. Nike says its Guided Runs fill that in, with coaches and athletes explaining what the hard sessions do, so if you want the why, run those sessions with the audio on.

Does it protect you from injury?

Not well enough. The plan keeps hard days apart, but it builds fast in the early weeks and leaves strength training out.

Week 5 shows the problem. You run about a third more than in week 4, and the plan's first tempo run arrives in the same week. Sudden jumps like that tend to raise the risk of injury, and many injuries start suddenly, right after one, rather than building up over months. Your heart and lungs usually catch up with a jump within a few weeks, but tendons can take months. If you've never run more than the mid-20s in miles a week, weeks 5 to 12 are the stretch that will test you, and there's no lighter week in them to catch your breath. The first comes in week 13, with 2 more at 15 and 17, squeezed between the biggest weeks of the plan.

The plan does some important things right. There's only one hard day a week, and every one starts with a warm-up. With 2 rest days a week and easy runs everywhere else, a hard day never follows another one.

You'll have to add strength training yourself. None of it is on the schedule. A rest-day note mentions short routines in another Nike app, but nothing is planned. That's a real gap, because strength training substantially lowers injury risk in sport. Two-time Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge sees it the same way. "In my mind the gym work helps to chase away the injuries and train the muscles," he wrote, as INEOS's magazine quoted him.

The plan tells you to listen to your body, and its troubleshooting section covers what to do if you get hurt. But it doesn't list the early warning signs. The one to know is the niggle, a small ache that's still there at the start of your next run. A niggle may be the first warning of an injury that stops you running altogether, though so far that's been measured in soccer players, not runners. Marathoner Nigel Martin, who ran 2:18 in his first marathon, ran on one for months until it gave out in a road session. "You're much more likely to get side-lined by the niggle you know about than something that crops up out of the blue," he writes. Take an easy day or two when one shows up, rather than pushing through to stay on schedule.

What happens when you miss a day?

Every run in this plan has a priority. The long run and the hard session come first, easy runs second, rest days last. When a crowded week leaves room for only some of it, you know what to keep and what to let go.

The troubleshooting section at the front goes further. It names the things that actually derail a marathon build: a clash with your calendar, feeling worn down, a terrible run, a missed session, an injury. Each one comes with something specific to do, so you aren't left guessing on the day it happens.

The plan also expects you to adjust. It says to rearrange the week if you need to, to turn a rest day into a few easy miles if you feel good, and to skip the Guided Run if you'd rather run without one. With 2 rest days a week, there's usually room to move a run. If you do, keep the hard day and the long run apart, because the plan leaves that part to you.

Will it get you ready for race day?

The plan builds the endurance a marathon needs, but it never lets you practice marathon effort, and its taper starts late.

The long run is the heart of most marathon plans. Runners who go longer in training often finish faster, although nobody has tested whether shorter, faster sessions could do the same job. Here the long run grows steadily: 13.1 miles in week 9, 16 in week 11, 18 in week 12, and 22 in week 14. That 22-miler comes 4 weeks before race day, which leaves time to recover from it. Most weeks from week 5 on also include a tempo run or longer repeats at a comfortably hard effort.

What's missing is marathon effort itself. The long runs set a distance and nothing else, and the hard sessions are all faster than you'll race. For most recreational runners, marathon pace sits below that comfortably hard tempo effort, so the tempo work and the race are different kinds of running. And nothing in the plan lets you practice the race: how your effort should feel at mile 8, and what it takes to keep it at mile 18. Race day is the first time you'll find out. Four-time Olympian Shalane Flanagan did the opposite. "When I'm in training, I am literally putting myself on the course in Boston or New York," she once explained, so she could "execute under pressure and not be overwhelmed by the moment."

The taper also starts late. After the 22-miler week, the running drops, then climbs almost all the way back 2 weeks before the race. That week brings the plan's longest tempo run and an 80-minute Tuesday run that Nike calls a "Recovery Run". Then race week drops sharply. A taper of up to 3 weeks improves race performance, and this plan has one. It just leaves you carrying more tiredness into the final 2 weeks than it needs to. When two Dublin researchers studied the training logs of more than 158,000 recreational marathoners, strict 3-week tapers were linked to finishes a median 2.6 percent faster than tapers that barely cut back.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes, and you can feel it in one session. In week 3, the fartlek alternates 1 minute hard with 2 minutes easy for 21 minutes. In week 14, the same 21 minutes come back with the pattern flipped: 2 minutes hard, 1 minute easy. The plan doesn't point it out, but it's a clear way to see how far you've come.

Across the plan, the hard session changes every week: short repeats at your 5K effort, a pyramid that mixes 10K, 5K and mile efforts and ends with 2 short bursts as fast as you like, hill repeats, steady tempo runs, longer repeats at 5K and 10K effort, and the out-and-back that makes you speed up on the way home. Each kind trains something a little different, and mixing clearly hard sessions with easy running tends to build endurance a little better than a steady diet of medium effort.

The easy running holds it all up. About 87 percent of your miles are easy, and that easy running is the base every hard day sits on. One hard session a week, surrounded by easy runs and rest, means you can give each one your best.