Running Plan Review Runner's World Break 3:15 Marathon Training Plan

Does it build you up smartly?

It builds well, but it doesn't change much along the way.

The growth is easy to see. Sundays get longer until week 13, and from week 6, every other Sunday carries a steady, harder stretch that grows from 2 miles to 8. The Wednesday sessions lengthen too. Each one lists the warm-up, every rep, the jog between and the cool-down, so what to run is never in doubt.

But the 4 phases are mostly names on the page. Training that shifts its emphasis from one block to the next tends to race better than training that holds one load, and here the shift is small. The steady Sunday stretches arrive in week 6, but the Wednesday in week 2 and the Wednesday in week 15 are the same kind of work: fast repeats between a lap and a mile long. Peter Snell, a triple Olympic gold medalist coached by Arthur Lydiard, put the classic order simply: "Develop endurance as early as possible." Building speed, he said, "is a relatively short process." The workout key says what easy runs, long runs and hills are for, but the Wednesday notes list the steps and stop there. You know what to run, not what that week's session is building.

Does it protect you from injury?

A plan protects you two ways: through the shape of its schedule, and through what it tells you to do around it. This one gets the first right and mostly skips the second.

The schedule is careful. Hard days never fall back to back, and Saturday is rest before every long run until race week. The weekly mileage builds without sudden jumps, and lighter weeks come in weeks 8, 10 and 14. Load that builds for weeks without a break tends to raise the odds of injury and illness, so those breaks earn their place. Every Wednesday starts and ends with easy miles.

The long run is the one place the build moves quickly. Through week 13 it keeps setting a new longest, each 2 miles or more past the last, from 10 miles in week 1 to 20 to 22. Sudden jumps in running tend to raise injury risk, most clearly when one run goes well past your recent longest. Each step here is modest, but they come one after another.

Strength is where the page goes blank. No day carries strength work. The Saturday rest note suggests light mobility work or an easy yoga class, and Tuesday and Friday are easy days, but which of them gets a strength session, and what goes in it, is yours to supply. That gap matters, because in a review of 25 trials, strength training cut injuries to about a third.

The plan is also silent on pain. If an ache is going to show up, it will likely be in the big sessions: the 8 steady miles of week 12's Sunday run, or the 10 to 11 mile Wednesday in week 14. An ache that lingers between runs may point toward an injury that stops you running. Easing off for a day or two when one appears is cheap insurance, but the plan never says so, and the call is yours.

What happens when you miss a day?

Not much. When a week goes wrong, the plan offers one line: you can swap cross-training for the optional easy runs. The 2 optional days give a heavy week some slack, but there's no word on a missed Sunday or Wednesday, or on which runs to keep when you only have room for two. You make that call yourself, in the middle of the week that went wrong.

The paces are the bigger issue. Every Wednesday comes with an exact pace, worked out from the goal and printed on the page. That's clear, but it's fixed, with no effort or heart rate alternative and no check partway through to see whether it still suits you. If the goal is a stretch, every Wednesday from week 1 is pitched at the fitness you hope to have by race day. Training adjusted to the runner tends to match or beat a fixed, one size fits all plan, and this one never adjusts.

The closest thing to a check comes on Sunday. The workout key describes the steady stretch in the long run by effort, about 6 or 7 out of 10, and by week 12 that stretch is 8 miles long. How the last of those miles feel tells you more about whether the goal fits than any Wednesday will. "I think it's hard to extrapolate race predictions from one session alone," says Jo Wilkinson, a former elite marathoner and coach. In her view, "the best indicator of race times is training as a whole." If they feel like a race, take that seriously, even though the printed paces won't change.

Will it get you ready for race day?

A marathon at a goal time asks for two kinds of fitness. The first is endurance, and marathoners who train with longer long runs tend to finish faster, though that is an association, not a test of whether shorter, harder sessions could stand in. The second is a higher threshold, the effort you could race for about an hour, which most coaches build by running close to it.

This plan builds both. The long run reaches 20 to 22 miles three weeks before race day, the Sunday steady stretches sit near threshold, and the Wednesday repeats push past it. Week 14 hides two very different weeks behind one box on the grid: a 5K race, or a 16-mile run if you can't find one. The race gives you a read on your fitness before the final weeks. The long run gives you one more long day.

But you never run at the pace you plan to race. There's a case for that. For everyday marathoners, race pace sits below threshold, and the slower the goal, the wider the gap. Race-pace running and threshold running are different kinds of training, and either is a reasonable choice. But at this goal, the gap is small. Race pace sits only a step below the Sunday steady effort, close enough that the two are easy to confuse. With no rehearsal on the schedule, race day is the first time you'll hold that pace for long. Coach Bill Pierce, whose FIRST marathon plans include a long tempo run at goal pace, said that run means "improving your efficiency at the pace you want to run in your marathon."

The taper is the other gap. Cutting back the running while keeping some speed in your legs tends to help runners race better. This plan keeps the speed, which is right, but it keeps the size too. Week 14's Wednesday runs 10 to 11 miles, and week 15's packs 8 to 10 fast 800-meter repeats into a day just as long. Those are some of the biggest sessions in the plan, and they land in its final three weeks.

Are the workouts varied enough?

On Wednesdays, yes. Everywhere else, very little.

About 87 percent of the running is easy, which is the right foundation. Easy running makes up most of the weekly mileage and is the base the harder work sits on. And the hard running stays clearly hard, which tends to serve trained runners better than a steady stream of medium efforts.

Wednesday is where the plan shines. Over 16 weeks you run repeats of a lap, two laps and a mile, sets that mix all three, and ladders that climb to three laps and back down. No two weeks in a row bring the same session, so there's always something new to aim at. Several Wednesdays are 800-meter repeats run in 3 minutes 15 seconds each, building to 8 to 10 of them in week 15. That echoes 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.

But repeats are the only fast running in the plan. There are no strides, sprints or drills anywhere. Strides take a few minutes at the end of an easy run, and while they haven't been tested directly, short, explosive efforts like sprints and jumps can help distance runners use less energy at the same pace. Some Fridays send your easy miles over the hilliest route you can find, which the workout key says builds leg and lung power. But those are still easy miles, not the short, fast efforts that can make a stride more economical.