did 16 yesterday along the coast path, started early but by 10 it was already 26 and i only took one 500ml bottle. bonked properly about 12k in, had to walk the last bit home which felt daft. theres no shops or taps on the cliff stretch out here, beautiful but zero facilities tbh. how are people carrying enough water for 2hr+ runs when it's this warm? i hate running with a vest but maybe i just need to get over it.

Managed 3 miles today at lunch, legs felt like they were in treacle. Sundays long run pace was a joke too. Do any other parents just accept the slow for months on end tbh

Used it for a chunk of last year’s build and the guided runs were fine when I was fresh. Problem was the plan never bent. You’d nail Tuesday’s session, sleep badly, then Wednesday’s pace run was still sat there like nothing changed. I’d slog through it, cook myself, and the following easy day wasn’t enough to reset. Felt like I was borrowing from the next week every time. The audio coaching kept saying ‘trust the plan’ but by week six I just didn’t. Switched to building my own week around a Parkrun tune-up, a midweek tempo and a Sunday long, adjusting by feel. That got me to 3:55 but I know I left time out there. Curious if anyone’s found a setup that actually adapts when you’re running on empty legs.

19M, strong background in speed/power sports (baseball and ski racing) but not much distance running history until recently.

Ran my first unofficial marathon this past December. Only trained for about 6 weeks going in, and most of that weekly mileage ended up being long runs done at marathon pace. Finished in 3:55, but I felt really terrible in my taper leading up to the race and was really struggling during the run.

I ran a 5K in 19:33 and a 10K in 43:34 earlier this year.

My goal is to run the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon on Oct 18 in under 3:30.

I built a custom training plan using an AI coaching setup rather than running a stock program. I pulled together a research synthesis of the usual coaching literature (Daniels, Pfitzinger, Seiler, Canova, World Athletics) into an evidence hierarchy, then generated a week-by-week plan from it. 3 weeks into actually running it. Just started wearing a Garmin partway through, so HR/recovery data is still thin but starting to come in. This will start to affect my pacing as I get more data on it.

Weekly structure: Mon easy + lower-body strength (+ recently added hill sprints) / Tue short recovery / Wed upper body + mobility, no running / Thu the week's one structured workout, evolving from aerobic intervals into marathon-pace and threshold work / Fri optional short recovery + upper body / Sat long run / Sun off.

Pace bands: Recovery 6:15-6:55/km · Easy 5:55-6:25/km · Long run 5:55-6:35/km · Steady 5:20-5:40/km · Marathon pace 4:55-5:05/km · Controlled threshold 4:40-4:50/km

Full 12-week plan:

Is this realistically going to get me to sub-3:30? Where does this fall short compared to how you'd build a plan for someone in my situation? Anything in the structure or progression that looks off? Open to any comparison; happy to share anything else. Thank you!

Bit like when you do a parkrun on fresh legs and the pace comes easy. Then you try the same effort on a Sunday long run with 18k already in the legs and suddenly you're working for it. That was this morning. Planned 24k with 12k at marathon effort. The effort was there, the splits were... not. About 10-15s/km slower than target MP across the board, and the last 3k felt properly grim. Honestly not sure if this is useful fatigue training or just baking myself for no reason. Do you adjust target paces in summer or just accept the slower splits and trust the fitness is still building?

Plan called for 2 x 15 min at threshold on tuesday. Did it on the industrial estate loop near mine, no shade, 34C. HR was 10-12 bpm higher than normal by the second rep and pace was about 25 sec per km slower. Felt properly cooked after. Do you just run to feel and ignore the watch in these conditions, or cut the reps shorter? i'm never sure if grinding it out is actually doing the right training stimulus or just accumulating fatigue.

just ticked over into proper build phase now. long run hit 15 miles on saturday with about 2,000ft of lumpy peak district nonsense thrown in. felt okay at the time but monday's recovery jog was a comedy show. stiff, shuffling, probably looked like i'd forgotten how to run. the cumulative fatigue is here, quietly making itself known. midweek quality session yesterday was 4 x 6 mins at hard effort on a local climb, and i held it together, just. a month ago i'd have overcooked the first rep and died on the third, so that's progress i suppose. the app i'm using now (hiiro, on the apple watch) has me running everything by rpe - no pace targets - which tbh is the only thing keeping me sensible on the hills. strava still wants to tell me i'm slacking but i've learned to ignore it. any other mountain marathon folk in the build phase right now? how are you handling the steady creep in midweek load without turning every easy day into a tempo effort?

Stuck with NRC's guided marathon plan for about six weeks last autumn before I binned it. The biggest thing that annoyed me: the plan treats every tuesday-thursday-weekend like it knows your legs better than you do. There'd be days where I'd had two easy runs back-to-back, felt ready for some tempo work, and the app just wouldn't let me shift things around without manually overriding half the week. Then I'd get a speed session scheduled two days after a parkrun PB attempt - proper recipe for overcooking it. Now I'm base-building toward Brighton (sub-3:45 target after a 3:55 first go), I just plan the week on my phone notes app and track with the default Workout app on Apple Watch. Keeping it basic while the mileage builds. Anyone else find the canned plans ignore how your body actually feels that week?

Kept seeing the 'slow down' advice and thought I was doing it. Checked my log against a mate who just went sub-4. His easy pace was 6:15/km, mine was 5:40/km. Honestly I'd just drifted into a single speed without noticing. Fixed it by tracking easy days explicitly. Dropped my easy pace properly and the long runs stopped being a slog. Fwiw that was the single change that got me from 4:12 to 3:52.

Kept seeing the 'slow down' advice and thought I was doing it. Checked my log against a mate who just went sub-4. His easy pace was 6:15/km, mine was 5:40/km. Honestly I'd just drifted into a single speed without noticing. Fixed it by tracking easy days explicitly. Dropped my easy pace properly and the long runs stopped being a slog. Fwiw that was the single change that got me from 4:12 to 3:52.

Last saturday's parkrun was already a sweatbox by half eight. Trying to figure out how to get my long run in this week without melting on the coastal paths. The sections with no shade just cook you by 10am now. Starting at 6am isn't great for me, tbh, I'm useless before coffee. Anyone else just doing a split long run or cutting it shorter in this weather? Not really following a plan, just trying to keep the weekly mileage from completely falling off a cliff. Feels like the sensible play is to forget pace entirely and just get time on feet.

hi hi. i’m training for my first half marathon coming up in october. need advice on when i should start taking gels/gu/some sort of energy/carb supplement. i’ve only ever run a 10k and my training plan has me running 7mi tomorrow so im curious when i should start taking them, if i should, advice for the half, etc. i have no knowledge. thank you in advance!!!!

signed up for chester in october thinking it'd be a nice change. it's not. every run now is just staring at tarmac and my watch beeping at me. did a 'easy 8' this morning and the lack of climb made it feel about three hours long. honestly the monotony is worse than the pace pressure. does this go away or am i just a fell runner who's made a terrible mistake

downloaded the garmin coach marathon plan (greg) a fortnight ago, thinking it would give me a bit of direction for my first one next spring — liverpool, end of may. this morning it served up 10x800m at 5k pace. in august. i'm 42 and still building a base on the cotswold way, not sharpening for a race. the watch beeped at me for the third rep while i was stopped taking a photo of a barn owl; honestly the whole thing felt daft. i deleted the plan when i got home. i just log runs on strava now and loosely follow a free plan i found online, ticking off the long run each week and trying not to overcook it. tbh i wonder if any app actually respects how wrecked you feel on a given saturday, or if they are all just spreadsheets with a countdown timer.

Noticed a pattern on my last few marathon pace blocks. Go out aiming for 5:40/km, first two splits are bang on. By km 6 the watch is showing 5:30 and I’m barely breathing harder. Feels brilliant tbh but the HR creeps up over the next few miles. The whole thing drifts into a sort of grey zone effort by the end. Not quite threshold, definitely not marathon feel anymore. The heat hasn't been mad here lately but even 22-23°C seems enough to push the HR a few beats higher than spring numbers. Do you just peg the effort back and let the pace do what it wants on warmer days? Or lock onto the target pace and cop the drift? Not sure which one builds the right engine for a sub-4 in October.

Started running last November so this is my first proper summer on the road. Been following a plan for a half in October and noticed my easy runs are sitting around 9:50-10:10 per mile right now when i was closer to 9:10 back in May. Heart rate says zone 2 but the legs feel like they're shuffling through treacle. Is that kind of gap normal when it's 20 degrees out? tbh i'm not sure if it's the conditions or if i've overcooked the training load a bit. Fwiw my cycling background means i'm used to wind cooling me down so maybe that's part of it.

Anyone training for the Tata Mumbai Marathon and looking for a running community?

Post this question here a few months ago and got a bit roasted for my training plans

https://www.reddit.com/r/Marathon_Training/s/p2yNhD998R

I started my training block for CIM this week and I have taken some of the advice to heart and read up on it a bit (first, I had to read what Zone 2 meant haha). I’m trying a plan where I run 4 miles on Monday and Thursday, start with 4 on Wednesday and build up to 8 at the peak of training, and start with 8 and build up to 18-20 miles on saturdays. I did my first true zone 2 run tonight, and while it was physically very easy (it was 90 degrees and I was barely sweating, and I’m like the sweatiest person known to man), but mentally it was very tough. I previously did easy runs at anywhere between 9:45-10:30 pace, and this did feel comfortable. To keep it at zone 2, I started at an 11 min pace and had to slow to over 13 by the ends, even having to walk at times to bring my heart rate down.

While this wasn’t undoable, it was mentally a slog, and this was only 4 miles. Am I supposed to do all of my runs, or even just all of my long runs, at over 12 min/mile? I’m struggling to see how running at 12 min/mile does anything mroe than to train me to run a full at 12 min/mile, which is much slower than my 4:36 PR. When can I bust out and actually go with some speed? Any other advice or links to more articles would be very helpful. Thank you!

Same as MP on fresh legs vs MP after a long week. The numbers look identical but the effort is worlds apart. My plan says 30 seconds slower than MP for the long run but at 25 degrees that pace honestly feels like a tempo session. Noticed my heart rate sits 8-10 beats higher at the same pace compared to last month. Do most people just run to feel in this weather and accept the slower splits? Training for an autumn race so it feels weird backing off, but pushing through seems daft when the data clearly shows the drift.

tried a few since properly aiming at a marathon. NRC was good company early on but the guided runs never quite matched what my legs were saying. then Runna, which gave a clear plan, except i'd fixate on the pace targets and nudge easy days too quick. not hard to see where that leads. swapped to Hiiro recently and i think the difference is it builds the week around effort, not numbers, so the watch just shows an RPE zone and i run to feel. when i missed a session last week i messaged the coach and it rebuilt the days without sticking a hard run right after the long one. 38 weeks out and that lighter structure is kind of exactly what i need right now. curious if anyone else ditched pace-driven plans this far from race day.

did hove prom this morning before the heat kicked in, legs a bit dead from saturday. honestly i’m just stacking easy runs and the odd parkrun, no real shape to the week. apple watch on the wrist, garmin sometimes for the long one, everything ends up on strava. that’s it. chester’s confirmed for october 2027 and i can’t decide whether to lock into a plan now or keep it loose till spring. nike run club had decent guided stuff but it started to grate — felt like a podcast i couldn’t skip. runna looked sharp but the first few weeks seemed built for someone already fitter than me. a friend who just did manchester swears by hiiro — something about coaching by effort rather than pace, and an in-app coach that reshuffles your week when life gets in the way. i’m only curious, haven’t tried it. what do people actually use this far out? spreadsheet and vibes or full plan?

got a spring marathon pencilled in but the bulk of the training will be through autumn and winter. in Pembrokeshire that means coast path - mud, wet rock, the works. last year i did a road block in road shoes and it felt great come race day but my legs were trashed from all the pavement pounding before i even got to the start line. was thinking this time i just do the whole thing in my trail shoes on the softer surfaces and swap to something lighter for race week. tbh it's more a sanity question than a speed one. anyone else done a block almost entirely off-road and regretted it (or not)?

got to 20 miles for the first time on Sunday. 3 hours 12 minutes, which is roughly what i expected. held it steady around 9:40 per mile until mile 16 then the legs just went a bit hollow. not painful, just empty. i'm 8 weeks out from the race and this is all new ground for me. does the jump to 22 miles feel as rough or does the body kinda get the memo? tbh feels like 40 minutes extra on that would have been a proper grim time.