Running Plan Review Runner's World 16-Week Break 5:00 Marathon Training Plan

Does it build you up smartly?

Mostly. The hard work shifts as the race gets closer, but the plan names its phases without ever saying what each one is for.

A marathon build usually works in stages, and plans that shift their focus as the weeks pass tend to race a little better than plans that hold one load all season. Here the first 5 weeks are easy miles, a Wednesday track session and a Sunday long run. From week 6, Sundays alternate between the long run and a shorter run with tempo miles, and those tempo miles grow from 2 to 6. The Wednesday track session changes less. It asks for nearly the same speed in week 2 as it does in week 14, and what grows is how many repeats you run.

Base, Build and Peak all appear on the calendar, but the plan never explains what each phase is for or why the season is shaped this way. You can follow the weeks without ever learning what the middle of the plan is building toward. Peter Snell, the triple Olympic champion who later became an exercise physiologist, summed up his formula for Runner's World in 2012: "Develop endurance as early as possible. Developing endurance is difficult and time consuming." That's the thread this plan never names. From 8 miles in week 1, the long run grows to 20 in week 13, while the track speed barely changes.

The sessions themselves are written well. Nearly every hard session tells you what it's for, so you always know why you're on the track, and the track and tempo days come with a set warm-up and cool-down. The hill Fridays are the exception: 4 miles on the hilliest route you can find, with no warm-up and no set climbs.

Does it protect you from injury?

Only partly. The plan spaces its hard work well, but the habits that keep a body sound across 16 weeks are left to you.

Strength is the largest gap. The plan never gives strength training a day. In a week that already holds a track night, hills and a long Sunday, an unscheduled session is the first thing to get squeezed out. And regular strength training substantially lowers the risk of sports injury, so it's a costly thing to lose. "In my mind the gym work helps to chase away the injuries and train the muscles," marathon great Eliud Kipchoge wrote of his own training, as INEOS's magazine quoted him. On this plan, that gym work is yours to schedule, so pencil it in before the track nights and hills fill the week.

The plan's warnings are friendly but brief. The key says "don't overdo it" on the track and coaches your form on hills, but it never says what to watch for or when to back off. Early evidence, mostly from other sports, suggests a low-grade ache that hangs on between runs may raise the odds of a full injury, the kind that stops training altogether. A runner who has had one before is the runner this matters most for.

But the long run steps past your recent longest again and again. From week 3, every other Sunday brings a long run 2 miles longer than anything in the month before it, 6 times in all, from 10 miles up to 20. No single step is large, but the clearest injury risk tends to come from a single run that goes well past your longest of the past month, and here a smaller version of that step comes every other week. Two of the scientists behind that finding, Ida Lindman and Rasmus Østergaard Nielsen, called it a reversal: "Collectively, these findings overturn research we and others have been doing for 20 years or more." They still want other studies to confirm it. For this plan, it means the runs to watch are the 6 Sundays that set a new longest run, not just the weekly total.

What the plan gets right is the spacing. Hard days never fall back to back. New kinds of hard work arrive in lighter weeks, hills in week 4 and tempo in week 6, rather than piling onto a big one. Every track and tempo session opens with at least 2 easy miles and ends with an easy cool-down. And across any stretch of a few weeks, the weekly load climbs gently, with no sudden spikes.

The lighter weeks are well placed too. From week 6, Sundays alternate between a long run and a shorter tempo run, so the mileage rises and falls every other week, and weeks 8, 12 and 14 drop far enough to give your legs a real break. A runner on a fixed plan needs relief from load that keeps building, and lighter weeks written into the calendar give it without any guesswork.

What happens when you miss a day?

A long plan earns your trust in the weeks that go wrong. It should tell you which runs to protect when time is short, what to do after a missed week, and how to begin if you're a little below its starting point.

This one doesn't do any of those things. Every set run reads as equally important. There's no rule for a missed week or a few days off, and no way in for a runner who isn't yet at 24 miles a week or comfortable with 8 miles on a Sunday. The paces are fixed from the goal for all 16 weeks, too. That matters most for the runner this plan is built for, who often picks the number before a race has backed it up. If your fitness runs ahead of the goal or falls behind it, the numbers on the page stay the same.

The plan does build in some slack. Thursday's easy run is optional every week, and Monday's is too from week 10 to week 14. Optional runs can become cross-training, and rest days come with a short list of ways to use them: relaxing, meditating, light mobility or easy yoga. On effort, the key gives a 6 or 7 out of 10 beside the tempo pace, and tells you not to get tied to your watch on long runs.

But those are the easy cases. Lose a Wednesday session or a Sunday long run, and the plan has nothing to say. Putting the week back together, or deciding whether to repeat it, is up to you. Coach Hal Higdon once answered a first-timer whose taper had been wrecked by travel, illness, and jet lag 10 days out. His advice was to run a later race instead: "A first marathon should always be a joyous experience, not a Bataan Death March." This plan leaves that kind of call to you, so it helps to know going in that a later race is an option.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes. The plan builds the fitness a marathon at this goal demands, and it times the biggest work well.

The long run carries most of it. It climbs in 2 mile steps every other week from week 5, reaches 20 miles in week 13, and then steps down for the last three weeks. At this goal, the 20 miler is the longest you'll be on your feet before race day, and it matters. Marathoners who train with longer long runs tend to finish faster, though no one has tested whether shorter, harder sessions could stand in for them. The biggest week, around 45 miles, lands in the same week as the 20 miler and is the right size for the goal.

The tempo running is the other half. Those Sunday miles sit a little faster than goal pace, and the workout key explains why: running faster in training makes race pace feel easier on the day. For nearly everyone outside the elite, marathon pace falls below lactate threshold, the effort you could race for about an hour. So tempo miles and goal-pace miles are different kinds of training, and for recreational runners neither has been shown to beat the other. This plan puts its harder Sunday running into tempo. It never asks you to run long at goal pace itself, so race day is the first time you'll hold that pace for hours.

Week 14 gives you a choice of 12 easy miles or a 5K race. A tune-up race may help as pacing rehearsal, giving you a feel for starting controlled on a race morning. Pacing is something you can work on. After studying millions of marathon results, computer scientist Barry Smyth concluded that runners and coaches have some say over whether a runner hits the wall, "by focusing on making better pacing decisions." Pick the 5K, and its first mile is your chance to practice exactly that. After that, the running steps down over the final two weeks, and race week is light. A planned drop in training before the race improves race performance, and this one arrives on time.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Most of a marathon runner's training is easy, and it should be: easy miles are the base that carries everything harder. And mixing that easy running with clearly hard sessions may build endurance a little better than long stretches of steady, moderately hard running.

This plan has that mix. About 78 percent of the running is easy. The Wednesday track session changes shape nearly every week: 400 meter repeats, 800s, mile repeats, and sessions that combine several distances. Five Fridays send you over hills, four Sundays bring tempo miles, and week 14 offers a 5K race. The weeks rarely feel like a copy of the one before.

But there are no strides or drills anywhere in the plan. Strides are a few fast, relaxed pickups tacked onto the end of an easy run, and short, explosive efforts can make running more economical, though strides themselves haven't been tested directly. They would take a few minutes a week, but adding them is up to you. Coach Jay Johnson, author of Simple Marathon Training, wrote for Outside that in a marathon build, "you need to rev the engine with strides, at 5k pace or faster. It’s this last element that is rarely part of a marathoner’s plan in their first two weeks, and that’s a problem." This plan leaves them out for all 16 weeks, so a few after Tuesday's easy run is a simple place to start.