Running Plan Review Pete Pfitzinger Advanced Marathoning 18 Week, Up to 55 mi/wk

Does it build you up smartly?

A marathon build should change shape as it goes, and this one does. The early weeks lay down aerobic miles, the middle weeks add harder running on top of them, and the last weeks look more and more like the race. Training arranged in stages like this tends to work better than training that asks the same thing week after week.

Pfitzinger names each stage on the calendar: endurance, then threshold, then race preparation. It's the same order the book ranks what matters for a marathon. Each session says what to run: how many minutes of a threshold run are hard, how many repeats and how long, how many miles of a long run belong at goal pace. Most of the hard days say what they're for, and the book fills in the rest.

Does it protect you from injury?

Not as well as it should. The hard days never fall back to back, but the way the plan climbs toward its biggest weeks makes this its weakest area.

The 55 miles themselves aren't the risk. Runners who build up to higher mileage gradually tend to get hurt less, not more. But this plan reaches its peak in one big jump, and a very large jump in a single week tends to raise the risk of injury. Pfitzinger warns about this himself. Asked about the biggest mistakes his readers make, he named ramping up too quickly: "the body is very bad at adapting quickly to more than it’s used to. So you’ve got to be judicious with that. Otherwise you can easily end up injured," he told an interviewer. Week 11 adds about 13 miles at once and becomes the biggest week of the plan. And the long runs at goal marathon pace start in week 2, before your legs have settled into the new mileage.

Your body doesn't adapt to a jump like that all at once. Blood and muscle energy systems tend to improve within the first few weeks, while tendons take weeks to a few months and bone takes longer. So your engine can feel ready for the next big week while your tendons are still catching up on the last one. Lighter weeks are where a plan eases that load, but this plan offers very few. Across 18 weeks there are just 2, at 6 and 17, and week 17 already belongs to the taper. That matters on a plan you follow from a book, because a runner on a fixed schedule without a coach usually needs that relief written into the calendar.

Strength training is missing too. The book lays out a detailed strength program in its own chapter, but none of it appears on the schedule, so you'll be working out when it fits around long runs and hard days. That's a real gap, because strength work is one of the better-supported ways to lower injury risk in sport. Pfitzinger has said why it's left off. "Our readers don’t have the time to focus on that," he told an interviewer. "And we can’t really prioritize it without taking away from the running that’s going to be of greater benefit to them." That's a limit on time, not a verdict against strength work, so on this plan finding the time is up to you.

The book helps you spot overtraining and illness. But it has no path back from a specific injury, so you'll need your own rule for the small aches. A niggle that lingers between runs may raise the risk of an injury that stops you, though the evidence so far comes from soccer players rather than runners. Treat the first one as a reason to take the short end of the day's range, or the day off.

What happens when you miss a day?

No 18 week plan runs exactly as printed, and Pfitzinger knows it. The book has a whole section on fitting training around the rest of your life, and its advice is unusually specific.

A table tells you what to do after missed days. Under 10 days, carry on with the schedule. From 10 to 20 days, rethink your goal only if the race is less than 8 weeks away. Past 20, rethink it either way. Threshold runs are written in minutes rather than miles, so the effort asks the same of you at any speed, and every kind of run except the fastest comes with a heart-rate range. The calendar has room too. With Monday and usually one midweek day open, there's somewhere to move a run, and every distance is a range, so a tired day can take the shorter end.

But a short week leaves the hard choice to you. The book ranks what matters for a marathon, with endurance first, then threshold, then the faster work, then speed, and it says long runs come first. It never turns that into a list of what to drop when a week shrinks, and the guidance is split across two chapters. In practice, keep the long run, then the week's hard session, and let a recovery run go.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Most of the race preparation here is strong, and the long runs and the taper are excellent. But there's a gap and a tradeoff worth knowing about before you start.

Long runs are what most marathon training rests on. Marathoners whose long runs go farther often finish faster, though no study has tested whether shorter sessions could take their place. This plan takes its long runs seriously. You reach 20 miles three times, the last of them 3 weeks before the race. The race preparation weeks hold the plan's most unusual pairing. In weeks 12, 14 and 16 you race a tune-up on Saturday and run 16 to 17 miles on Sunday. Nobody has tested whether tune-up races make a marathon faster, but they may help you rehearse your pacing. And the long run that follows teaches you to keep going on legs that already raced. That lesson has a cost. "A race is run at a significantly greater effort, pulling out more energy than the body can restore," Boston coach Bill Squires and his co-author Bruce Lehane wrote, as quoted by Doug Kurtis. So count each tune-up as one of the week's hard days. The plan helps by keeping the next Monday free of running. Once the tune-ups are done, the last 3 weeks ease off, and a taper of up to 3 weeks improves race performance.

The gap is size, and it costs time more than safety. At about 55 miles, the biggest weeks ask for more running than most marathoners at this level need to be ready. Pfitzinger ranks endurance above everything else, and the extra miles follow from that belief. But they add hours to every week, and more recovery between runs.

Threshold work is the tradeoff. This plan has 6 threshold runs, building from 20 minutes of hard running to as much as 45. The last comes in week 11, 7 weeks before the race. After that, the hard days turn to short, fast repeats and goal pace running. For most runners, marathon pace sits below threshold, so those goal pace miles are a different kind of training from a threshold run. Either is a reasonable way to prepare, and no study shows one beats the other. Pfitzinger keeps the goal pace runs few on purpose, because they're "tough on the body," he told an interviewer. "So I think the 18-week programs each have four of those," he said, enough to help without "really flattening yourself." This plan's 4 come in weeks 2, 5, 9, and 13, with 8, 10, 12, and then 14 miles at goal pace.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. Over 18 weeks you'll run eight different kinds of sessions, and each one has its own job.

Trained distance runners tend to improve more by keeping easy days easy and hard days clearly hard than by spending their weeks at a steady, moderate effort. This plan keeps more than four fifths of its miles easy: recovery runs, steady runs and the long runs. Even fast runners have to work at it. Kate Landau, a 2:31 marathoner profiled in the book, says that since a hamstring injury, "I made an effort to slow down my easy runs." Run yours the same way, and the hard days get the energy they need. The hard sessions shift from block to block: threshold runs in the first half, then repeats of 600 meters and 1 kilometer at about 5K effort, tune-up races, and the long runs at goal pace. That combination of easy volume with clearly hard sessions tends to build endurance a little better than long stretches of steady, moderately hard running.

Strides and short hill sprints turn up in most weeks, added to the end of an easy run: 10 second sprints up a hill and relaxed 100 meter strides. They're brief and cost almost nothing in fatigue. Short, explosive efforts like these can make the same speed ask a little less of you, though the research tested jumps and sprints rather than strides themselves. Coach Brad Hudson has his runners do steep hill sprints all year. They "increase the power and efficiency of the stride, enabling the runner to cover more ground with less energy in race circumstances," he writes in a workout guide. This plan's 10 second hill sprints are the same kind of effort, so keep them in even on days when the easy run before them feels like plenty.