Your first half marathon

How to run this plan

• The long run is done slowly — 60 to 90 seconds per kilometre slower than you expect to race.
• Practise your race-morning breakfast before every long run. The half marathon is long enough that what you ate matters.
• From 14 km onwards, carry or plan fluid. In Indian conditions this is not optional.
• Two weeks of taper. Resist the urge to test your fitness in the last fortnight — the fitness is already banked.

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 to three 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.