Running Plan Review Pete Pfitzinger Advanced Marathoning 18 Week, 70-85 mi/wk

Does it build you up smartly?

A marathon build has two jobs. It has to keep adding endurance week after week, and as the race gets close, it has to make the running look more like the race. Doing those in sequence, rather than all at once, is the idea behind phased training, and planned shifts in emphasis like these tend to beat training that never changes.

Pfitzinger sequences them well. The first six weeks are about distance, with the hour-long-race effort held to modest doses. The middle block stretches those efforts toward 45 minutes and builds the long run to its peak. The fast repeats wait until week 10, and the biggest marathon-pace run comes in week 13, once the base can carry it. New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard put the rule plainly in his book Run to the Top: "You must condition the body first so that it can stand the hard fast work." Here, that conditioning is everything before week 10, and it's what lets the faster work land on legs that can take it. Each block is labelled on the calendar, so you always know what the current weeks are for. Every session is written out too, with the kind of run, its distance and how much of it sits at effort.

Does it protect you from injury?

Mostly yes. The protections are real, but the plan leaves you exposed at three points.

Several things keep the load in check. Through the week, the hard days are kept apart. Every hard session opens with a warm-up. New kinds of workouts arrive one at a time, never in a week when the mileage also rises. And high mileage, built gradually, tends to go with fewer injuries, not more, though that evidence comes from watching runners rather than from trials.

The first weak point is the lighter weeks. The plan eases off in weeks 6 and 10 by about 10 miles, a small cut at this volume, and both still end with a 15- to 16-mile long run. Weeks 12 and 14 run fewer miles, but each one holds a tune-up race. Load that builds without relief tends to raise the risk of injury and illness, which is why a fixed plan needs real lighter weeks written in. World-class coaches in Norway, in sports such as skiing and rowing, build their seasons that way. "To prevent injuries and illnesses, we always implement a recovery week every 3rd or 4th training week," one of them told researchers. This plan's dips come on about that rhythm, but they're too small to do the same job. After each dip, the plan climbs straight past its previous high. Week 7 is about 28 percent bigger than week 6, and it's also the week the Monday doubles begin. Week 11 climbs by about as much and holds the plan's longest run. Measured against the past month, those climbs stay moderate, but they land on legs that have had only a small break. The race weekends add to it: in weeks 12, 14 and 16, a Saturday race is followed by a 16- to 17-mile run on Sunday.

The second is that there's no day off. From week 1 through week 17, every day has a run, and the first scheduled rest day is an optional one on the Monday of race week. The book lets you swap a recovery run for cross-training, and it caps recovery runs with a heart-rate ceiling. But it's still daily running with nowhere to hide. Early evidence, so far from footballers rather than runners, suggests a lingering ache may raise the odds of an injury that stops you, and a plan with no empty day gives that ache no room to settle.

The third is strength. The book lays out a detailed strength program in a chapter of its own. But the calendar never mentions it, so it competes with seven days of running for time and energy, even though strength training substantially lowers injury risk, more than stretching or balance work alone. Pfitzinger has explained the choice: "Our readers don't have the time to focus on that. And we can't really prioritize it without taking away from the running that's going to be of greater benefit to them." On a plan that fills all 7 days, that means the strength work only happens if you decide in advance where it goes.

What happens when you miss a day?

When a week goes wrong, the book's rule for missed training does most of the work. It turns a stressful question into a simple one, keyed to how many days you lost and how close the race is. It also covers what to do during busy stretches of life, and it tells you to ease into the next few fast sessions after missing some. Every day's distance comes as a range, so a tight day can take the short end. And because the hour-long-race efforts are written in minutes, not miles, a slower runner gets the same dose as a faster one.

But it doesn't rank the runs for a short week. The book says endurance matters most, then the hour-long-race effort, then faster work, then speed. That's a good principle, but there's no list telling you what to drop first when a week only has five free days. And on a calendar that already fills all seven days, a missed run has nowhere to go. Moving it means pushing something else, often into the recovery day that was protecting the long run.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes, with one gap. The marathon-specific work is where this plan's volume pays off, but the longest run comes earlier than it needs to.

Coaches treat long runs as the heart of marathon training, and this plan has two a week. Early evidence links longer long runs to faster marathon finishes, though no study has tested whether shorter, faster sessions could do the same job. The Sunday run reaches 20 miles in week 7 and peaks at 22 to 24 in week 11, seven weeks before the race. That peak goes past the 20 or so miles most marathon plans settle on, and it lands well before the 2 or 3 weeks out that coaches usually aim for. A second run of 11 to 15 miles sits midweek in nearly every week. By the taper, being on your feet for most of a morning is normal.

The marathon-pace runs grow across the plan, and the last is the one to look forward to: 14 continuous miles at your goal pace inside a 20- to 21-mile run in week 13. It's the plan's truest rehearsal. Somewhere past halfway, goal pace stops feeling like a pace you choose and starts feeling like one you have to hold, and that's exactly the feeling race day will bring.

The plan also trains the effort just above that. For most recreational marathoners, marathon pace sits below threshold, the effort you could hold for about an hour, so threshold runs and marathon-pace runs are different kinds of training. This plan gives you both, with threshold work through week 11.

The taper lasts 3 weeks, and race week carries about a third of the plan's biggest week. That's a deep cut from 80-mile weeks, and a taper of that length improves race performance compared with training straight through. It can feel wrong while it's happening. "The first marathon I had to taper, I felt like I was losing fitness," pro marathoner Reid Coolsaet once told a reporter. "But the way I felt in the first part of that marathon, I realized that it worked." Expect the same doubt when your weeks here fall from about 82 miles to 65, then 51. That drop is what the taper is for.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. The plan trains endurance, the hour-long-race effort, marathon pace and raw speed, each in its own way.

The variety comes in blocks. For the first 9 weeks, the hard days move between two things: long efforts at the hour-long-race effort and long runs with stretches at marathon pace. The only fast running is a few strides and 10- to 12-second hill sprints tacked onto easy runs. From week 10, repeats of 600 meters or a kilometer at your 5K race effort arrive, and from week 12 come three short races of 8K to 15K. If you like a rhythm you can settle into, the first half suits you. If you need change to stay interested, it may feel long.

The mix itself is well chosen. About 88 percent of the running is easy or steady, with clearly hard days set against it, and that mix may build endurance a little better than a lot of medium-hard running. The strides and hill sprints take a few minutes. Strides themselves haven't been tested, but short, explosive work can make each stride cheaper, though the results are mixed. Coach Brad Hudson, whose runners do steep hill sprints year-round, wrote that they "increase the power and efficiency of the stride, enabling the runner to cover more ground with less energy in race circumstances." That's a coach's view, not a test, but the 12-second sprints here take so little time that they're worth doing as written.

The tune-up races are the least certain part. Coaches widely recommend them, though no study has tested whether they change marathon finish time. There's a weak hint that racing experience helps with marathon pacing, and many coaches value them for that, though it's coaching judgment more than proof. Barry Smyth, a Dublin computer scientist who has studied millions of marathon results, writes that "experienced marathoners understand how to avoid hitting the wall." Three short races won't make you an experienced marathoner, but each one is another rehearsal in judging your effort from the start.