Running Plan Review Runner's World How to Run 1 Mile

Does it build you up smartly?

A beginner plan is built from two things: the order the weeks come in, and how clearly each day tells you what to do. This plan gets the first right and leaves the second bare.

The order makes sense. Walking comes first, for two full weeks, so the legs get used to steady work before any running. Then the running grows in small steps, from a tenth of a mile in week 3 to 0.6 mile by week 7, and week 8 joins the pieces into the mile. What grows is how far you run before each walk. Asked how a new runner should build up, two-time Olympic marathoner Pete Pfitzinger put the rule plainly: "the body adapts well to small increments, and isn't very good at assimilating larger increases." This plan keeps its steps that small, which is why the order works for someone starting from zero.

But the sessions are bare. Each one gives a distance to run, a distance to walk and a number of rounds, and stops there. Nothing explains why Saturday differs from Monday, or what any one session is for.

Does it protect you from injury?

Partly. The build is gentle, but the plan never tells you what an injury looks like on its way in.

Running asks something of your legs that walking doesn't: impact, landing after landing. The plan's own introduction makes this case, and it's a good one. Your heart, lungs and blood tend to catch up within the first few weeks, while tendons stiffen over weeks to a few months and bone takes months to change. Your breathing improves first and your shins last, so a beginner plan has to be paced for the shins. Lorraine Moller, an Olympic marathon medalist from the Lydiard school, calls this her golden rule: "you can never progress faster than your slowest part will allow." This one is paced that way. Through all five run-walk weeks, the weekly total stays between about 4 and 6 miles, walking included, and no single run goes far past the ones before it.

The plan never sets aside an easier week inside those five weeks, though. The first lighter week is the week of the mile itself. That matters on a printed plan, because training that piles up without a break tends to raise the risk of injury and illness, and a scheduled lighter week is the simplest way to build one in.

Strength helps. It's on the calendar from the first week and on four days a week from week 3, and strength training lowers the risk of sport injuries substantially, more than stretching does. "Running is a series of single-leg hops," HSS exercise physiologist Pamela Geisel tells new runners. "That takes a certain amount of strength and stability." But the plan names the strength days without saying what goes in them, so someone who has never lifted is left to build every session from scratch.

The bigger gap is warning signs. The plan's introduction names shin splints as what a rushed build causes, then leaves it there. There's nothing on telling soreness from pain, and nothing on what to do if a shin aches. Runners tend to describe injury as a sliding scale, from feeling fine to a small ache to a full stop. One club runner told researchers in Ireland how to tell the early steps apart: "discomfort can come and go, whereas a niggle is sort of always there." (A niggle is runners' word for a small ache that won't leave.) This plan never draws that line for you, so learn it before the running starts in week 3. A lingering low-grade ache may raise the odds of a full injury that stops you running, though so far that has been measured in footballers rather than runners. Spotting that first ache, and easing off when it shows up, is the skill a first-time runner most needs. This plan leaves it out.

The schedule adds a risk of its own, too. In week 5, Friday and Saturday both carry runs for the first time, though that Friday drops back to the plan's very first running session, a tenth of a mile at a time, so the pair is mild. But in weeks 6 and 7, Friday is a full session, and Saturday's longest pieces land on legs that ran the day before.

What happens when you miss a day?

Very little. The plan assumes you'll do every session in order, on the day it's printed.

Its starting point is clear, and that part is good. Week 1 asks for nothing harder than a 15-minute walk, which is where most coaches would want a plan for non-runners to begin. The walks also shrink while the running grows, so you move toward running on your own without being told to.

But when a week goes off course, the plan has no answer. There's no advice for a missed day, a cold, or a week that felt too hard, and no word on whether to repeat a week or move on. Every session looks equally important, so when you can't do them all, you're left guessing which to keep.

And the plan never says how hard any run should be. Not a word on effort, from the first tenth of a mile to the last. For a new runner, that's a common way things go wrong: the run pieces get run too fast, and the next one feels worse instead of better. Run/walk coach Chris Twiggs ended a post about pace with a simple test: "If you aren’t smiling when you run, at least on the inside, you’re doing it wrong." On this plan, that means every run piece slow enough to say a full sentence.

Will it get you ready for race day?

For a first mile, being ready means the last day feels like the next step, not a leap.

This plan gets you close. On the Monday of week 8, you run 0.8 mile without stopping, walk 2 minutes, and run another 0.6. The rest of race week is lighter than the weeks before it, which gives your legs room to recover before Sunday. And within about two months of steady running, the same easy pace comes with a lower heart rate. Matt Fitzgerald described the feel of it in Outside: "The fitter you get, the lower your perceived effort is at any given pace." For beginners, he wrote, "almost any pace feels uncomfortable." By Sunday, the first tenth of a mile back in week 3 is a long way behind you.

But the plan prepares you to finish a mile, not to race one. Total running stays low the whole way, and none of it is any harder than the run pieces. If you want a fast mile, or a mile that leads straight into a 5K, this plan stops short. And the last step is a real one: the mile is a quarter longer than any run you've done without a walk.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Within its one format, yes. Across formats, no.

The run and walk mix changes almost every session. Across the 6 weeks with running, there are more than a dozen different combinations of piece length and rounds, so the weeks don't blur together. The schedule is also easy to read: every day is a walk time or a run and walk count, and you can see the whole week at a glance.

But every running day is the same kind of running: run a piece, walk a piece, repeat. There are no hills, and no day with a different feel from the others. There are no strides either, a few seconds of quick, loose running added at the end of a run. For a new runner, they're an easy way to practice running relaxed at a quicker speed, and they would give a few days a different job. This plan leaves them out.