Running Plan Review Runner's World 16-Week Intermediate Marathon Training Plan

Does it build you up smartly?

A marathon build works best when it has a shape: easy running first, harder and more specific work on top of it, and a taper at the end. Plans that shift their emphasis like that tend to race a little better than plans that keep the training the same. The other half of a good build is the writing: each key session should say what to run and what it's for.

This plan has the first half. The early weeks are easy miles and hilly runs. Goal pace work arrives in week 5 and grows almost every week after, from 2 miles to 8. Track repeats join in week 9. Each block follows sensibly from the one before. Peter Snell, a triple Olympic champion coached by New Zealand's Arthur Lydiard, called his formula "relatively simple": "Develop endurance as early as possible. Developing endurance is difficult and time consuming." Building speed, he said, "is a relatively short process." This plan keeps that order: easy miles and hills first, then goal pace from week 5 and track repeats from week 9. But the plan never names its blocks or says what each one is for, so the shape is there for you to find rather than spelled out.

The hard sessions also say what to run more often than why. The hill days explain what hills do for your legs and lungs, but most of the repeats and goal pace runs come with instructions and no purpose. A runner who knows what a session is for runs it better, and knows what to protect when a week goes wrong.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly. The plan does some things well here, but it leaves out the protections that matter most over a 16 week build.

The good parts are real. Monday and Thursday are rest days in every week until race week, so Wednesday and Friday always have a day off between them. Every repeat and goal pace session opens with easy miles to warm up. And because each big week follows a smaller one, no week is far bigger than the month before it.

But step by step, the plan climbs steeply in two places, and you'll feel both. Week 9 hands you your first track repeats and your first 18 mile run in the same week. Week 11 is steeper still: 8 miles at goal pace on Friday, then your first 20 on Sunday, in a week more than a quarter bigger than the one before. Across the build, your weekly running roughly doubles. Your blood and muscle energy systems tend to keep up with that within weeks, but tendons usually need weeks to a few months to adapt, and bone takes longer still, and a run of big weeks can get ahead of them.

Nor does the plan give you a lighter week before the taper. A runner on a fixed plan needs relief from load that keeps building, and a scheduled lighter week is the simplest way to build it in. Coaches usually place one every 3 to 5 weeks. Every few Sundays the long run here steps back, but the hard days don't always step back with it. Week 10 shows it best. The plan calls it a cutback week, and it does add a third rest day. But it also holds the longest goal pace run yet, 7 miles on Friday, in the same week as your first 800 meter repeats. In week 10, the long run and Saturday get lighter, and both hard days get harder.

Strength training gets no day on the calendar and no mention in the plan. Monday and Thursday are already free of running, which makes them the natural home for it, but you have to decide that, and build each session, yourself. That's a real gap, because strength training cuts sport injuries more than stretching does. Two-time Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge and his training partners did two 60 minute strength and mobility sessions a week, and he didn't lift weights. "The exercises are not something where you suffer," said Marc Roig, the physiotherapist who oversaw the routine. The point was to back up the running "and avoid any negative interference." This plan's free Mondays and Thursdays have room for the same kind of work.

And nothing in the plan tells you what to watch for. The hill days give good tips for running downhill, but there is no word on when an ache means stop. Early evidence, mostly from other sports, suggests an ache that lingers from one run to the next may raise the odds of a real injury. Overuse injuries "may initially present as small pains that can easily be ignored and not addressed until significant pain or impairment is present," writes sports medicine doctor Pascal Edouard. A sore shin on the Saturday of week 11 is a reason to shorten or move the 20 mile run, not to grit through it. The plan never says so.

What happens when you miss a day?

A 16 week plan will lose a run somewhere. What decides the cost is whether you know which runs to protect and how to pick back up.

This plan does a fair job of fitting you at the start. It says who it's for, runners who have finished a marathon and run about 30 miles a week, and week 1 starts a little below that. It also gives you room to scale: the first 2 Saturdays can be anything from 0 to 3 miles, the week 14 long run can become a 5K race, and the peak long run is written as 20 to 22 miles.

But once the build is underway, you're on your own. The plan never says what to do with a missed run or a lost week, or which runs to keep when you can't do them all. Say you miss Friday of week 11, 8 miles at goal pace. Do you make it up on Saturday, the day before your first 20, or let it go? The plan doesn't say. As a rule of your own, the Friday goal pace run and the Sunday long run carry most of what this plan builds, and an easy day is the first to go. When the two collide, as they would here, protect the long run and let the missed Friday go. Bigger losses need a rule of thumb, and Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas, authors of the book Advanced Marathoning, offer a good one: "Missing 2.5 weeks of preparation when you have 16 weeks to go is no big deal, but missing that amount of time during the last 2 months of preparation will likely require you to modify your goal." On this plan, those last 2 months start around week 9, just as the first 18 mile run and the track repeats arrive.

The effort cues are clear, but the whole plan hangs on one number you choose before week 1, your goal marathon pace. Nothing helps you choose it, and nothing tells you what to do if 8 miles at it in week 11 feels like a race. A goal set too fast at the start stays too fast until race day.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Mostly yes. The plan builds the two things marathon training needs most, and it tapers well.

The first is the long run. Coaches lean on long runs because marathoners who train with longer ones tend to finish faster, though no study has tested whether shorter sessions could stand in for them. This plan has three big ones: 18 miles in week 9, 20 in week 11, and 21 in week 13. By race day, the distance itself holds few surprises. The second is goal pace. From week 5 on, almost every week holds a stretch at the pace you want to race, and it grows to 8 miles. Long before race day, you'll know how goal pace feels in your legs and your breathing. Then the last 3 weeks ease off, and a taper of 1 to 3 weeks improves race performance compared with training hard right up to the start.

But the long runs climb in a zigzag. A 14 mile Sunday sits between the 18 and the 20, and another between the 20 and the 21, so each big run steps up from 2 weeks back rather than from the Sunday before. Goal pace also stays out of the long run. Every Sunday is long and slow, and the longest stretch you ever hold goal pace is 8 miles, on a Friday, after a rest day. From week 5, the calendar puts goal pace two days before every long run, so Sunday starts on legs that still remember Friday. That's useful practice at going long while tired. If you also want to practice goal pace on tired legs, finishing a few long runs with some miles at it is common coaching practice, though no study has shown it beats a steady long run. Pete Pfitzinger, a two-time Olympic marathoner, recalls that he and many other Boston-area runners in the 1980s did something like it, "starting our long runs relatively slowly and building the pace until we were approaching marathon race pace for the last 6-10 miles." This plan keeps every Sunday slow, so that change is yours to make.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes, for the most part. You'll run hard in several different ways, with plenty of easy running around it.

For trained runners, keeping the bulk of the running easy and mixing in a few sessions that are clearly hard may build endurance a little better than steady, middling running. This plan does that. About three quarters of the running is easy. The hard days cover a real range: runs over hilly routes, a hill repeat session, mile repeats at 10K effort, 800 meter repeats, and goal pace runs that grow all season. That's a lot of range from only 2 hard days a week. The 800 meter repeats in weeks 10 and 13 follow a rule of thumb Runner's World made famous. "If I can get my 800s down to 2 minutes 50 seconds, I'm in 2:50 marathon shape," longtime staffer Bart Yasso told the magazine's Amby Burfoot. It's a rule of thumb, not a tested forecast, so treat a good session in week 13 as a sign you're on track rather than a promise for race day.

But the variety arrives late. Until week 8, Wednesday is a run over the hilliest route you can find, with no set effort and no set climbs, so how hard it is depends on where you live. True hill repeats show up once, in week 8. And there are no strides anywhere. Strides are a handful of short, fast, relaxed runs tacked onto the end of an easy day. Short, explosive efforts can make running more economical, though strides themselves haven't been tested directly. Across 16 weeks of mostly steady running, they're a cheap addition the plan passes up.