Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Scan to
download
An 18 week plan wants four runs a week. Three of them sit before work without much argument. One grows from three miles to ten while you aren't looking, and that's the one that decides how early you're getting up.
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time tells you when.
Scan to
download
Beginner plans all look alike from a distance: a couple of easy runs midweek, a long run at the weekend, two rest days. The midweek runs are not equal to each other. In Hal Higdon's Novice 1, which he calls his most popular program, Tuesday and Thursday never go past 5 miles and sit at 3 or 4 for most of the build. Wednesday goes from 3 miles to 10.
So one weekday session more than triples while the others stay roughly where they started, and it tends to get scheduled once, in week one, when it was half an hour. By week fifteen it's closer to a hundred minutes with work sitting on the other side of it. Step up a level and it gets more pronounced: Pfitzinger's 18/55 schedules a medium-long run of 11 to 15 miles midweek, though that's a five or six day week written for experienced marathoners.
Which weekday carries the long midweek run, and which weekend morning carries the long run. Everything else in the week is small enough to shuffle around a job without much thought. Put the midweek long run on the day your evening is least likely to collapse, since that's the run you'll be tired for, and put the weekend long run on the morning you don't have to be anywhere afterward.
The alarm follows from there. A run before work carries about 105 minutes of everything else: five minutes to wake up, five to get dressed, ten for water and coffee, a five minute warm-up, ten to cool down, twenty-five in the shower, twenty for breakfast and twenty-five commuting. Add the run, subtract from the time you have to be at your desk, and you get the alarm for that session rather than for running in general.
That's a fifteen mile Saturday, and the arithmetic is the part nobody does in advance: two and a half hours of running takes four hours fifty of morning once you count eating early enough to settle, kitting up, cooling down, and being fit to speak to anyone afterward. Ten miles pulls the alarm back to around 6:30. Twenty pushes it to 4:50.
Which is the gap between having a training plan and having a week that works. The plan gives you distances. What you need are start times, and those depend entirely on when you have to be somewhere afterward. Set the deadline to the thing you can't move, whether that's a desk at 8:30 or the family being up by ten, and every step in front of it gets a time.
| Day | Session | Time it costs | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | Rest | — | — |
| Tue | Easy, 3 to 5 miles | 30 to 50 min | Before work, alarm barely moves all program |
| Wed | Midweek long, 3 to 10 miles | 30 to 100 min | Before work early on; the one to protect later |
| Thu | Easy, 3 to 5 miles | 30 to 50 min | Before work |
| Fri | Rest | — | Nothing, deliberately, the day before the long run |
| Sat | Long run, 5 to 20 miles | 50 min to 3.5 hours | Weekend morning with nothing after it |
| Sun | Cross-training | 30 to 60 min | Anywhere it lands |
Distances follow Hal Higdon's Novice 1 across the eighteen week build, and the times assume roughly a ten minute mile. Week eight is the one exception to the grid: the Saturday long run gives way to a tune-up half marathon on the Sunday. The two shaded rows are the only ones that need a decision from you. The rest of the week fits around a job on its own.
Four runs a week is four mornings, and they aren't the same morning. Each one has a different run in the middle and a different fixed point at the end, which is all it takes to need a different alarm.
Novice 1 runs 15 miles in week one and 40 in week fifteen, which at a ten minute mile is two and a half hours of running against six hours forty. The extra is smaller than people expect, because you were going to shower, eat and commute anyway: a morning run adds the kit, the warm-up and the cooldown, call it twenty minutes a session. That puts an easy week near four hours and peak week near eight. The number that bites isn't the weekly total, it's that each running day starts about an hour and three quarters before you leave for work.
Four is the usual answer for a first marathon, and it's what Novice 1 asks for: four runs, one cross-training day, two rest days. Intermediate and advanced plans go to five or six, adding both easy mileage and faster work like pace runs and hills. Three days a week is a real option if the long run stays put and cycling or swimming covers a couple of the others, and a three day plan you finish is worth more than a five day plan you stop following halfway.
Whichever one has nothing after it. The run itself is only half the cost, since a three hour effort takes the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon's energy with it. Saturday is the common pick because it leaves Sunday to recover and because a Friday rest day sets it up, but a Sunday long run works fine if Saturdays are when life happens. Pick one and keep it, so the rest of the week can be planned around a fixed point.
Racing something shorter first? The bike race and triathlon mornings work the same way, or browse every routine.
Plans for the mornings this creates