Sub-3:30 marathon

How to run this plan

• Six days a week means five of them must be easy or the plan collapses in week nine. Easy is 5:50–6:20/km here.
• The mid-week medium-long run is what separates this plan from the sub-4 one. Do not trim it when the week gets busy.
• Carbohydrate intake of 60–90 g per hour, practised in training until your gut tolerates it.
• Take the cutback weeks fully. At 80 km a week, the adaptation happens in the down weeks, not the up ones.

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 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.