How we train, and how to build your own week around it
This is the thinking behind the Saturday long run and the Tuesday session. It is not a coaching program and it is not personalised to anyone. It is what works, written down, so you can take as much or as little of it as you want.
Roughly 80 percent of your running should feel genuinely comfortable, and the other 20 percent should be properly hard. Almost everyone gets this backwards and ends up running everything at the same medium effort, which builds very little.
It feels productive. It is not. Medium-effort running is hard enough to leave you tired for the session that matters, and easy enough that it builds very little on its own. Slowing your easy runs down is usually the fastest available improvement, and it costs nothing.
Three runs a week for six months will take you further than six runs a week for three weeks followed by a month off. The people who improve are not the ones with the biggest weeks. They are the ones who are still here in March.
If you miss a session, do not make it up. Skip it and rejoin where the week is. Doubling up to catch up is how a good block ends in a calf strain. One missed session costs you almost nothing. Three weeks injured costs you everything.
The usual guidance is to add no more than about 10 percent to your weekly distance, and to take an easier week roughly every fourth week. It is a rough rule rather than a law, but the direction is right: your heart and lungs adapt faster than your tendons and bones do, so you will feel ready to increase before your legs actually are.
None of this is original. It is the same approach almost every distance coach has landed on for fifty years. The hard part was never knowing what to do, it is doing it every week when nobody is watching.
Every pace you need comes off one honest recent effort. A parkrun, a 5km time trial, or a recent race. Not your best ever, and not what you think you should be able to do. What you can run today.
| Recent 5km | Easy and long | Threshold | Intervals |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22:00 | 5:45 to 6:05 | 4:45 | 4:20 |
| 25:00 | 6:20 to 6:40 | 5:20 | 4:55 |
| 27:30 | 6:50 to 7:10 | 5:50 | 5:25 |
| 30:00 | 7:20 to 7:40 | 6:20 | 5:55 |
| 32:30 | 7:50 to 8:10 | 6:50 | 6:25 |
| 35:00 | 8:20 to 8:45 | 7:25 | 6:55 |
All paces per kilometre. Between two rows, split the difference. These are guides, not instructions, and the easy range is deliberately wide because easy is about effort rather than a number.
| Goal | Pace needed |
|---|---|
| Sub 30:00 5km | 5:59/km |
| Sub 60:00 10km | 5:59/km |
| Sub 2:15 half | 6:23/km |
| Sub 2:00 half | 5:41/km |
| Sub 4:30 marathon | 6:23/km |
| Sub 4:00 marathon | 5:41/km |
A sub 2:00 half and a sub 4:00 marathon are the same pace, but they are nowhere near the same achievement. Holding a pace for 21km and holding it for 42km are different problems. As a rough guide, a marathon you can actually finish well is run 15 to 25 seconds per kilometre slower than your half marathon pace. If someone tells you both goals are "just 5:41", they have done the arithmetic and skipped the physiology.
You do not need it. Effort and pace are enough. But if you do use it, two things are worth knowing.
With those two numbers, easy running sits at roughly 60 to 70 percent of your heart rate reserve, threshold around 80 to 90 percent, and intervals above that. Your watch will do the arithmetic once you have told it the right maximum.
Heart rate lags effort by a minute or two, drifts upward on hot days and in the second half of long runs, and reads high when you are tired or under-slept. Treat a single reading as noise and a fortnight of readings as information.
Three runs is the shape. Add a fourth easy run when you want more, not a second hard one.
Warm-up 9:15, run 9:30 sharp, River God Fountain in Fitzroy Gardens. Same spot every week. Distances are on the Saturdays page so you can decide before you leave the house, and there is a 5km option every single week.
The day after the long run is not the day to prove anything.
Rest days are part of the training, not a gap in it. Adaptation happens when you stop, not while you run.
Intervals, threshold, or hills. The one run of the week where you are genuinely working. See the Tuesday sessions tab.
Keep it clear so Tuesday and Thursday both land properly.
Easy pace, 5 to 8km, conversational the whole way. If you finish wanting more, that was the right effort.
Long run tomorrow.
Adding a fourth run? Make it an easy 5 to 8km, and put it on Sunday or Wednesday. More easy running is the highest-value thing most runners can add. A second hard session is the fastest way to get injured.
One hard run a week. Any of these work, and rotating between them beats doing the same one forever. Every session starts with 2km easy and finishes with at least 1km easy, without exception.
4 to 6 x 1km at threshold pace, 90 seconds jog between. The bread and butter. Long enough to matter, short enough to hold the pace honestly. Should feel controlled for the first two reps and like work by the last one. If the final rep falls apart, start 5 seconds per kilometre slower next time.
2 x 3km, or 3 x 2km, at threshold pace, 2 to 3 minutes jog between. Fewer, longer efforts. Teaches you to sit in discomfort rather than escape it, which is exactly what a half marathon asks for.
8 x 400m, or 6 x 600m, at interval pace, jogging the same distance between. The top end. Hard, short, and over quickly. Most runners never train this and it is usually the biggest untapped gain available, especially if all your running has been steady.
8 to 10 x 45 seconds up a moderate hill, jog down to recover. Strength and running form disguised as a run, with less impact than flat intervals. Good in winter and good when you are coming back from a break.
4 to 6 x 20 seconds, fast but relaxed, full recovery between. Not a session on its own. Tack them onto the end of an easy run once or twice a week. They keep your legs remembering how to turn over without costing you anything.
A session on a flat, uninterrupted surface tells you far more than one on a hilly loop with traffic lights. Hills inflate your heart rate at any given pace and stopping at lights breaks the effort up, so the numbers stop meaning anything. If you want to know whether you are improving, run the hard ones somewhere flat and run them continuously.
Pair it with your harder days so the easy days stay easy. Twenty to forty minutes is plenty, and doing it badly twice a week beats doing it perfectly never.
If you buy one thing, buy adjustable dumbbells. Everything below works with a pair. Bodyweight versions of all of it work too, they just take longer to bite.
Why bother. Late in a long race your form falls apart before your fitness does. Your glutes stop firing, your stride shortens, and your pace goes with it. That is a strength problem, not a running one, and no amount of extra kilometres fixes it.
35 to 40 minutes. The heavier of the two. Pair it with your hard run day.
Kettlebell or one dumbbell at your chest. Sit down between your knees, chest tall. The last two reps should be a genuine effort.
Dumbbells in front of your thighs, soft knees, hips back, slide the weights down your legs. Hamstrings, never lower back. Probably the single best lift for running economy.
Back foot on a chair, dumbbells at your sides. Brutal and worth it. Running is a single-leg sport and this is the most honest test you can do at home.
Shoulders on the couch, dumbbell across the hips, squeeze at the top for a full second. Builds the glute drive that fades late in a long run and takes your pace with it.
Off a step, full range, slow on the way down. Calves and achilles take enormous load in running and almost nobody trains them until something hurts.
Hips still, no rocking. The point is resisting rotation, which is what your trunk does every stride.
30 to 35 minutes. Lighter. Bodyweight is fine throughout.
Step back, drop the back knee, drive through the front heel. Kinder on the knees than a forward lunge.
Balance is the exercise. Go slow, keep the hips square, use a light weight or none at all.
Chair or a low box. Drive through the standing heel, control the way down. Do not push off the back foot.
Band above the knees, small athletic stance. Wakes up the glute medius, which is the muscle that stops your knee collapsing inwards at the end of a long run.
Stack the feet, lift the hips, breathe normally.
Opposite arm and leg, slow, no twisting through the hips.
Lower back stays flat on the floor the whole time. If it lifts, shorten the range.
You do not have to race. Plenty of people here never pin a number on. But if you want to, the calendar is on the races page, and a few of us will usually be at each one.
Every race you enter should have a job. Racing one properly costs about ten days of recovery, so you cannot race everything and still build.
Take a recent race result and scale it. Doubling the distance costs roughly 6 to 7 percent on your pace, so a 10km time of 55:00 points at a half of around 2:01, not 1:50. Be honest about what you have run recently rather than what you ran two years ago.
Women, take the standard predictors with a pinch of salt. Most of them are built on male-dominated data and assume you will slow more over distance than you actually will. If anything, expect to hold your pace slightly better than the calculator says over the longer distances.
Flat road, a bib, adrenaline and a field pulling you along makes goal pace feel free. It is not. Almost every bad race in history was decided in the first ten minutes. Go out at or just behind your target and let the second half be where you take time back.
The jump from 10km to a half, or a half to a marathon, is mostly about the long run. Everything else stays roughly the same.
| Goal race | Longest run before it |
|---|---|
| 10km | 12 to 14km |
| Half marathon | 18 to 22km |
| Marathon | 30 to 32km |
| Ultra | Back-to-back long days, not one huge one |
Very few marathon plans go past 32km in training. The last 10km of a marathon is built by the cumulative weeks, not by one enormous run that wrecks you for a fortnight.
Finish it. That is the whole goal. Pick a pace that feels almost too easy for the first half, walk the aid stations if you need to, and take the time you lose there as cheap insurance. You will spend the last 10km overtaking people who went out too fast, which is a much better day than the alternative.
Then take two weeks properly off. No running, no structure, no watch. The temptation to keep going while the fitness is there is enormous and it is how people end a good year injured. Come back easy, rebuild slowly, and the next block starts from a higher floor.