Running Plan Review Runner's World 16-Week Marathon Training Plan: Break 3:45

Does it build you up smartly?

A marathon build usually changes what it asks of you as race day nears: easy mileage first, then one kind of harder work, then another, and finally running that looks more like the race itself. Plans that shift their emphasis this way tend to beat plans that repeat the same load, though the measured gain is a small one.

The shift here comes in two clear blocks. For the first 5 weeks, your hard running is the Wednesday speed session, with easy miles around it. From week 6, steady, hard miles join the Sunday run every other week, so through week 13 you train two kinds of hard running side by side. Each phase is named on the grid, with a short note on what it's for.

This plan writes every session out clearly, with its warm-up, its repeats and its cool-down, and a short note on how each kind of run should feel. Most of the hard sessions also say what they're for, so you head out on a Wednesday knowing why the session matters.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly. The plan spaces its hard days well, but it leaves the bigger risks for you to manage.

What it gets right is the rhythm of each week. Saturday is a rest day in every week before race week, so the hilly Friday and the hard Sunday never run into each other. And every speed session opens and closes with 2 easy miles, so you never start hard running cold.

The plan also eases off in its own way. From week 6, the long Sunday run comes only every other week, so the mileage rises and dips in a sawtooth, and weeks 8, 10 and 14 are noticeably lighter. Three lighter weeks across 16 is in line with common coaching practice, and a fixed plan needs that kind of relief built in, since load that piles up without a break tends to raise the risk of injury and illness. Weeks 8 and 10 are lighter in miles, not in effort, though. They're the weeks that carry the hilly Friday and the steady, hard Sunday, and the weekly mileage figure misses a lot of how hard a week really is.

But the mileage climbs in steps, and the two steepest come in weeks 7 and 13. Week 7 brings about a fifth more running than week 6. Week 13 brings about a third more than week 12, with the longest run of the plan, up to 22 miles, and a speed session of 10 to 12 miles in the same seven days. Sudden jumps in running load tend to raise the risk of injury, and a weekly jump of more than about 30% is a warning sign. Week 13 crosses that line. The long run also goes a little past your longest run of the past month 5 times, starting in week 3, a smaller step of the same kind. If a big week is what hurt you last time, week 13 asks you to take that step again. Ultrarunning coach Cliff Pittman puts the limit plainly: even if research shows weekly mileage can rise faster than 10 percent, "that doesn't mean it's automatically safe to increase weekly volume by 20% or 30%." If week 12 leaves you tired, keep week 13's long run at 20 miles, the low end of its range, and let the optional easy days go.

Strength training gets a mention and nothing more. None of it is on the schedule, so choosing the days and building the sessions is left to you. That's a real gap, since strength work has good evidence behind it for lowering athletes' injury risk. Marathoner Shalane Flanagan, who had few injuries in her career, put it down to one thing: "I attribute that to being as strong as possible." This plan leaves that work to you, so give it a set place in your week from week 1.

The plan's notes are generous in tone. The speed-session note warns you not to overdo it, and admits that some days you won't hit the paces perfectly. That's good advice for a workout. But it isn't a plan for pain. Nothing says what to do about an ache that's still there on the next run, and early evidence, gathered in footballers rather than runners, hints that an ache like that may raise the chance of an injury that stops you running. When an ache lingers, the safer move is to trade the next hard day for an easy one or a day off. The plan never tells you to.

What happens when you miss a day?

Every training block runs into real life sooner or later. What helps then is a plan that tells you what to keep and what to let go.

This one gives you some room. Most weeks have one or two optional easy runs, and you can swap any of them for cross-training or rest.

But the plan doesn't help much past that. It never says which runs matter most, what to do after a missed long run, or how to come back from a cold or a week of travel. Every session reads as equally important. If you lose a week, the grid stays as printed, and the replanning is yours.

The paces don't bend either. Every hard session's pace comes from your goal time. If the goal is realistic, that's a clear target. If it's a stretch, every Wednesday speed session for 16 weeks is pitched too fast, along with the steady, hard miles in weeks 6, 8, 10 and 12. And if you get fitter faster than expected, the paces stay where they started. There's no heart-rate option. Beyond the printed paces, the only effort guides are the talk test on easy days and a 6 or 7 out of 10 for the steady, hard miles.

The plan also names one starting point and offers nothing for runners above or below it. Coaches generally agree a plan's first week should sit near the mileage you already run, so compare your last few weeks with week 1 before you begin.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes. This plan builds the fitness a marathon asks for.

The long run grows the way it should. Every other Sunday it climbs: 14 miles, then 16, then 18 to 20 twice, then 20 to 22 in week 13. That last one comes three weeks before race day, which leaves time to recover from it. Olympic champion Peter Snell learned the long run on a 22-mile loop near his coach Arthur Lydiard's home in New Zealand. Near the 15-mile mark one day, he said he wanted to stop. "Well, if you stop now, you'll miss the whole purpose of the workout," his training partner Murray Halberg told him, as Snell later told the story. Week 13 can take you the same 22 miles, and the miles after you'd like to stop are part of the point. Most coaches build a marathon around long runs like these, and marathoners who train with longer long runs tend to race better, though no study has tested whether shorter, faster sessions could stand in for them. Mileage peaks at about 48 miles a week in week 13, a solid amount for a marathon at this level.

The steady, hard Sunday miles are the plan's smartest idea. They build from 2 miles in week 6 to 4, then 6, then 6 again, always faster than race pace. For most runners outside the elite, marathon pace sits below threshold, the effort you could race for about an hour, so these miles and race pace are two different kinds of training. Both are reasonable choices for a recreational marathoner, and no study shows one beats the other. This plan builds on the faster of the two, a step at a time, inside runs that already have miles in your legs.

In week 14 you choose between a 16-mile long run and a 5K race. The 5K is a chance to rehearse race morning, from the alarm to the start line, and racing experience may help you pace the marathon itself.

The last two weeks are a taper. The long run drops to 8 miles in week 15. Race week holds on to a little speed with a short Wednesday session of 400-meter repeats, 6 to 7 miles in all, then eases into a 3-mile shake-out the day before the race. Cutting back for up to 3 weeks before a race, while keeping some faster running, improves race performance compared with not cutting back.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Mostly. The hard days come in plenty of forms, but the plan leaves out short, fast work.

About 80 percent of your running is easy, and the hard days are clearly hard. That's the pattern trained distance runners tend to improve on more than a steady stream of medium-effort miles.

The Wednesday sessions keep changing shape. Some weeks it's a set of 400s, other weeks 800s or mile repeats, and some weeks it's a ladder that climbs from 400 meters to 1,200 and back down. Set against all that easy running, those Wednesdays give you the blend of easy miles and clearly hard repeats that may build endurance a little better than long stretches of moderately hard running. The hilly Fridays and the 5K option add more variety on top.

But there are no strides anywhere, the handful of quick, light pickups some plans add to the end of an easy run. They take a few minutes on a run you're already doing, and they're a cheap way to practice running fast. Jay Johnson, a coach and the author of Simple Marathon Training, wants them in from the start: "you need to rev the engine with strides, at 5k pace or faster." Strides are "rarely part of a marathoner's plan in their first two weeks," he writes, "and that's a problem." This plan leaves them out of all 16 weeks. Short, explosive work can help runners use less energy at the same pace, though strides themselves haven't been tested directly. The hilly Fridays are good for your legs, but they're regular runs over rolling ground, not short, hard climbs. Running coach Jason Fitzgerald calls hill sprints his favorite sprint workout, saying they "can make you less prone to injury, increase your power, and improve your running efficiency." This plan has none, so adding them is up to you. Strength work, which also makes each stride more economical, would fill some of the same gap.