Just tootling along my “personally created” Runkeeper 5k plan, which led me all over the place, from surges, to 6k, to recovery runs, and then back to 5ks. Strange.
So the jury is still out on this one. But I’ve already noted a few pros and cons:
PROS:
- as a personalised, automatically created plan, it takes your pace and time scales into account, creating individual runs and programming your workouts for you. Brill!
- it caters for very slow runners like me, as not often the range of paces is extended to snail paces like mine. So big plus!
- for when one wants to have a plan in an app without audio guidance (allowing you to listen to podcasts) this is a great solution. Also music works well!
- and it’s great to have a plan all built into an app with runs being ticked off as you progress.
CONS:
- it schedules runs onto days of your week, which would be good if you could easily change these. But if you need to run on another day, the only way to change it is to call up that run on the day your running, and when completing it, it adds another run into your plan. So one is now complete and the other has an x beside it, as it wasn’t completed. Bummer.
- if you fall behind, it asks if you want to “re-plan” your plan, but this is a permanent change and cannot be undone. I’ve done this twice and the result was chaotic, with some of my formerly already completed runs now scheduled as not attempted yet. Huh! 😠
=+=+=+=
But I’m enjoying it, and it’s great to have a little guidance and also nudges to do some interval training.
My plan now ramps up in distance to 13k, before tapering back below 10k to hit the “race day”, so we’ll see how it goes.
Happy running, everyone !
End of the Garmin 5k Plan
Running plan to get from 5k to 10k
