How to plan your training

Follow these steps to create an overview of your training plan. The detail should be added a week at a time depending on whether the previous week has gone to plan. You must be flexible with this and adapt the plan accordingly if you have had a set back or if something else in life has cropped up.

Create a timeline.

Use a calendar or diary or draw a line on a page to represent the time between now and the big day. Write in any parkruns and low priority running events that you would like to do. You could also put in any family or work commitments you have as you may need to plan easy training around them.

Chunk your training

Have a look at these other events and chunk your training into blocks. If possible schedule the other events at the end of each block. In an ideal world these would fit nicely every six weeks or so but in the real world that doesn't often happen! The blocks should be between three and seven weeks in length.

Plan your training loads

Now it's time to draw some pretty patterns on your plan! You need to think about how easy or hard you are going to train in each week. To make training work you should progress the work load gradually over the first two thirds of the block and then taper down towards the end. The next block should start a little harder than the previous one with the last block in the plan being easier than all of the others in order to taper down towards the event.

So the first block may look like this:

easy, easy, moderate, moderate, easy, easy

The second block may be:

easy, moderate, moderate, hard, moderate, easy

The third:

moderate, hard, hard, moderate, moderate, easy

The fourth:

easy, moderate, hard, moderate, easy, easy.

Plan your focus

During a training block you could focus on building an aerobic base, building strength endurance, speed endurance, pushing up your lactate threshold level or improving your running economy.

How do you choose your focus?

Generally, runners begin by building an aerobic base, move onto strength-endurance and then speed-endurance. However, you may want to assess your strengths and weaknesses to help you determine what your focus will be. You may already know where your strengths and weaknesses lie or you may want the advice of a coach at your club, the leader of your group, or a physiologist who would be able to carry out physiological test.

This should have given you the skeleton of your training plan. The next step would be to fill in the detail.

Why not let our Training Wizard do that for you? All you need to do is to tell him: what you are training for, your goal, your focus and whether it should be an easy or hard week and he will do the rest!