I’ve started a Runkeeper 10k plan, automatically created for my needs, and this morning I ran my second run.
It’s quite neat. You put in your pace, when your final race is, how often you run, and voila, it gives you a whole plan, which looks pretty robust although quite standard. It also sets up the interval runs correctly in Runkeeper. And when you run these, they get automatically ticked and you can shove runs around in the week. Pretty cool.
The benefit of this way of creating a plan is that it does not include any audio coaching, which I currently do not want as I am enjoying listening to my podcasts whilst running. But it still allows you to tick off every run in the app, which I definitely appreciate. So this morning second run, 4.5k.
My automatically created 8-week plan has four phases:
First two weeks is the preconditioning phase, with a mix of recovery and long runs, and inbetween runs with “surges”.
Next two weeks are about getting faster, with the introduction of some tempo runs.
Then the next two weeks is title “getting farther”, but in truth all the weekly long run increase in length weekly, just like in the magic plan.
The last two weeks is called Fine Tuning, with a good mix of different runs and tapering as well.
Happy running, everyone!