Running Plan Review Runner's World 40+ Maintenance Run Plan

Does it build you up smartly?

Not well enough, though the idea behind the month is a good one. Honerkamp's intro makes the case for it well. After a big build, or between goals, a runner still needs to hold onto fitness, and in his view it fades faster past 40 than it did at 25. His answer is a smaller version of normal training: a long run, an easy run, and one run with some intensity. That's a sensible plan for a maintenance month, and the weekly shape follows it. One harder Tuesday, an easy Thursday and a Sunday long run make a routine you can follow without thinking.

But the plan gives you the routine and little else. The sessions arrive as instructions with no reasons. Week 1's tempo is "1 mile easy, 2 miles medium, 1 mile hard," and nothing explains what that run does for you, or why the fartlek, the hills and the track laps come in that order. When nothing is building toward a race, knowing why a run is there is what keeps you running it well. "With most runners, when I ask them what they're hoping to accomplish on a given run, they look back at me with a blank stare," says Bill Pierce, a co-founder of the FIRST training program. So before each Tuesday, ask yourself what that session is for, because this plan won't tell you. And the plan stops after 4 weeks. What you do in week 5 is up to you.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly. The plan keeps the basics in place, but for a plan sold to runners past 40, the missing strength work is hard to overlook.

The good parts are real. There's only one hard session a week, so no two hard runs ever fall on consecutive days. "High-intensity training does have a negative effect," triple Olympic champion Peter Snell once said, "if you don't allow the body to recover." With a full week between Tuesdays, this plan gives your legs that time. Every hard session starts and ends with an easy mile, so your legs are warm before the work begins. And there are 2 full rest days in every week, which a body that recovers slower than it used to will appreciate. Week 2 is lighter, too, and a lighter week written into a fixed plan is the easiest way to give your legs relief from the running.

The biggest gap is strength. The plan mentions it, but it never puts a session on the calendar, so fitting it around the running falls to you. That matters, because strength training lowers the risk of sport injuries, and does more for it than stretching. Marathon great Eliud Kipchoge once wrote that "the gym work helps to chase away the injuries and train the muscles." This plan leaves that work to you, so put it on your own calendar before the month begins.

The second gap is the last week. Week 4 has 3 more miles than week 3, the longest long run of the month, and the plan's first track session: 8 fast laps of 400 meters. Weekly mileage only tells part of the story here, because faster running adds stress that the miles alone don't show. Two miles of fast laps land on your legs very differently from two easy miles, so the last week is a bigger step up than its numbers suggest.

The plan's injury advice is sensible: cut mileage, intensity or time when pain crops up. But it's one sentence, and it doesn't name any warning signs to watch for. A niggle, a low ache that hangs around from one run to the next, may raise the risk of an injury that stops you running altogether. The evidence so far comes from footballers, not runners. But running writer Scott Douglas, who is in his 60s, says small aches tend to hang around longer as you age. "One week of trying to finesse your way through a tender calf becomes two, then four, and before you know it you haven't done anything fast or long for two months," he wrote about older runners. If you notice one, take that as your cue to cut back, the way the plan's one sentence suggests, without waiting for it to turn into pain.

What happens when you miss a day?

Real life rarely leaves a month of training untouched, so a maintenance plan has to give way when it needs to. This one does, fairly well for a plan this simple.

Its attitude helps. The plan says it's written in pencil, not pen, and it means it: swap days when you're busy, cut back when something hurts, and use the Saturday flex day to run, cross-train or rest, depending on the week you're having. With only 3 runs, a lost Tuesday has room to move to another day of the week. It also tells you where to start. The long runs assume you can already cover them comfortably, so you know before day one whether this plan fits you.

But it leaves two decisions to you. It calls the long run the most important workout of the week, and it marks Tuesday as the harder day, but it doesn't say which to drop first when a week only has room for two runs. And it describes every effort in a word: easy, medium, hard. Nothing says what medium should feel like, how hard is hard, or how to tell if you've got it right. A runner who has done tempo runs before will fill that in from experience. A runner who hasn't is left guessing.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. In four weeks you run four different kinds of hard session, and almost everything else is easy.

Easy running makes up most of a runner's week, and it's the base the harder work sits on. On top of that base, easy running mixed with clearly hard intervals and fartlek may build endurance a little better than long stretches of steady, moderate running. And most coaches keep easy days clearly easy and hard days clearly hard, rather than filling the week with medium days. Too much of that middle ground, in the view of University of Agder researcher Stephen Seiler, flattens your body's response to training. "The athlete's physiological transmission gets stuck in the middle gears," he wrote in an email.

That's how this plan is built. About 9 in every 10 miles are easy, and Tuesday is a different session each week. Pierce, the FIRST coach, learned why that helps. "I used to run the same speed workout week after week," he recalled. "After a while, I would start to dread that workout. Speedwork is much easier when you change it around a lot." This plan changes it for you every week. In week 1 the tempo moves from easy to medium to hard, so you learn to keep working as you tire. Week 2's fartlek has you surge 8 times whenever you choose, each one lasting anywhere from half a minute to two minutes. Week 3 takes you uphill, and week 4 to the track, where the laps are short, fast and over before the effort can wear you down. You come out of the month having run hard in four different ways.

The grid is easy to read, too. It shows the whole month at a glance, with a note each week naming that Tuesday's session.