Sub-25 5K

How to run this plan

• Two quality sessions a week is the maximum that most amateur runners absorb. Do not add a third.
• Easy days at 6:20–6:50/km. If you cannot run your easy days that slowly, your quality days are not hard enough.
• Track work is far easier to pace than road work. If a 400 m track is available, use it for the interval sessions.

Strength work. Strength: 20 min of squats, lunges, single-leg calf raises, glute bridges and planks. This is the injury insurance. Add it on an easy day or straight after an easy run — never the day before a quality session. If you want the movements themselves written out, running's supporting exercises, by muscle worked and equipment needed, is the reference.

The principle underneath the table

Roughly eighty per cent of the running in this plan is easy, and that ratio is not a compromise — it is the mechanism. Easy running builds the aerobic machinery that lets you absorb the hard sessions; hard running that is not paid for by easy running just accumulates fatigue. The most common way an amateur plan fails is that the easy days creep up to a moderate pace, the hard days consequently drift down to the same moderate pace, and the runner spends twelve weeks training one gear.

The second principle is the cutback week. Volume in this plan does not climb monotonically; every third or fourth week it drops. Adaptation happens during recovery, not during the session, and a plan without down weeks is a plan that banks fatigue until something gives.

The third is the taper. The last two weeks reduce volume sharply while keeping a small amount of intensity. It will feel wrong. Do it anyway — nothing you run in the final fortnight can make you fitter, and plenty of it can make you tired.