Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.
It's rarely the running that stops you. More often you're lying there at 5:58 doing math about whether there's still enough time, and deciding there isn't. By the time you've finished the argument you've lost twenty minutes, and the math has come true. A backward plan settles it the night before, so the alarm is just the alarm.
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 run more than triples while the others stay where they started. Everything wrapped around a run barely moves: getting dressed, a warm-up, the cooldown, a shower, breakfast and the commute come to about 105 minutes whatever you ran, give or take the longer cooldown and bigger breakfast a long one earns. So the run is what moves the alarm around, and on a Wednesday in week fifteen it moves it more than an hour earlier than it did in week one.
Ready Time works backward from when you need to be at your desk. That usually produces an alarm earlier than you'd like, and it's much better to learn at 9pm than at 6am. Change the run and everything ahead of it slides: the three plans below all put you at your desk at 8:30, and the alarm lands at 6:15, 5:45 or 5:05. Then take the decisions out of the morning: kit on the chair, shoes by the door, watch charged, route already picked. Getting dressed half asleep should mean putting on the clothes that are already there. If the plan says 5:05 and 5:05 is genuinely not happening, shorten the run and keep the alarm you'll actually obey.
Mornings win on reliability, because nothing overruns into 6am. Evenings lose runs to meetings that go long, to dinner, and to the hour where going back out stops sounding reasonable. That's why the session you can't afford to miss tends to end up before work, whether or not you're a morning person. If your job genuinely protects your evenings, the reverse works fine. Either way the useful move is the same: pick the slot, then work backward from the fixed point at the other end of it, whether that's your desk at 8:30 or dinner on the table at 7.
Get a nudge at the right moment, while there's still time to act.
Each step gets its own alert, so you know what's next and how long you have.
“A key part of my planning process. Well worth the investment.”App Store review
Ready Time
You know what you need to do. Ready Time helps you know when to start.