When to start preparing your race

Counting back

These are conventions, and we label them as such. No study has compared plan lengths against each other.

What the evidence does support: the last stretch should be a taper ¹, and how fast you add volume is where the risk sits ²³.

What to do before the block starts

The weeks before a plan are the cheapest place to buy yourself a better block.

• Get regular before you get serious. Three to five easy runs a week for a month beats a heroic first week of the plan.
• Fix the niggle. Something you have been ignoring will not survive twelve weeks of building.
• Find your real paces. Not the ones you would like. A plan written on wishful numbers falls apart in week four.
• Enter the race. An ambition that is not on a calendar quietly becomes next year.

Fitting it round a life you already have

The plan you finish beats the plan that was optimal.

Decide before the block how many days a week you can genuinely run. Build the plan on that number, not the one you wish you had.

Four running days with two real sessions, done for sixteen weeks, takes almost any runner further than six days attempted for five weeks and abandoned.

The same goes for disruption. Travel, a bad cold, a rough month at work — these are normal. A block that cannot absorb them was badly built. And you lose fitness far slower than you fear: a missed week is not a lost block ⁴.

How we handle this

Every plan starts from your race date and works backwards.

The number of training days comes from you, not from a template. Where the evidence is thin — plan length, long-run distance, how fast to build — we use conventions and say so, rather than passing a convention off as a finding.

Every race page on this site shows the date and counts back to the week a block would need to begin.

Questions people actually ask