Half marathon training plan, personalised to you

What the half marathon actually asks of you

The half is the distance where threshold work pays. It is long enough that pace discipline decides the result, and short enough that you can hold something close to your threshold for the whole race. That makes it a different problem from the distances either side of it. A 10K is run above threshold and survived. A marathon is run well below it, and is decided by fuelling and by what your legs still have at thirty kilometres. The half sits on the line.

Threshold is really two abilities, and training only the first is why people run a strong first hour and a ragged final quarter. Capacity is how fast that line is. Durability is whether the line is still where you left it after an hour of running. Both are scored separately against your race, and the plan emphasises whichever one is short.

The long run matters here, but its role is more modest than in the marathon. You are not rehearsing hours of accumulated damage. You are building enough aerobic endurance that race pace stops feeling hard, and enough fatigue resistance that the closing kilometres cost what the opening ones did. The long session floor shown above sits well under what a marathon plan has to reach.

Pacing is the third thing, and it costs more places than any training error. Setting off at 10K effort feels controlled for roughly twenty minutes, and it is the classic way to lose fifteen minutes across the last five kilometres. Race-pace structures late in the season exist to make your target pace a familiar sensation rather than hopeful arithmetic.

Why the plan you downloaded does not fit

A downloaded plan is not badly written. It is written for an average athlete, and it cannot learn anything about you. It does not know your threshold pace, or how fast your performance decays as distance grows, which is the number that says whether your problem is speed or durability. It does not know that your race climbs through the last five kilometres, or that it is flat and will be decided by economy alone. It does not know you can run Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sunday mornings and nothing else.

Every figure in it was chosen for someone else. When you miss a week, it says nothing at all.

How your plan is built

Your training history goes in as supply. Your race goes in as demand, read from the course itself when you upload it, with climbs, descents and flats measured separately rather than summed into one elevation figure. The Focus Lab scores one against the other, names the gap that matters most for this event, and shows the measured size of it alongside the abilities already on target.

The season is laid out backwards from race day, through Prep, Foundation, Event shaping and Peak. If you have trained off other plans, Foundation is what that literature calls base and Event shaping is what it calls build. Early weeks tackle the focus points furthest from the race demand. The final shaping weeks tackle the most event-specific ones, which for a half means sustained work at and around goal pace. Every session states the ability it trains and the rule that decides whether it worked. Guided run plans covers the running-specific machinery underneath.

Where the minimum length comes from

Worth saying plainly. The minimum length shown above is graded as established coaching practice, not as a research finding. It is a floor drawn from the coaching literature rather than an outcome measured in a trial.

For the half marathon specifically, it is one of five rows in the guided ladder that are product interpolation between sourced neighbours. No book on the shelf prescribes a half marathon minimum, so the row was placed between the distances that are sourced, and it carries that limitation in its applicability notes inside the product. The marathon and ultra rows are extracted from named published plans. This one is reasoned. You should know which you are getting.

What changes when your goal changes

The wizard asks what outcome you want, not only which race you entered. There are five levels, from finishing to an excellent result, and every minimum scales with your answer. Chasing an excellent half rather than a finish means roughly twice the weekly training time and two more sessions a week, over a longer minimum length. Same race, same athlete, genuinely different plan.

The minimums are destinations, not week one. Nobody starts at the weekly hours shown above. Your ramp is bounded by your own recent training, so the plan grows you toward that peak at a rate your history supports.

What a week actually looks like

At the session floor above, a half marathon week resolves to a threshold or race-pace key session, a long run, and easy running that stays easy rather than quietly turning into another hard day. Add sessions and the extra slots go to aerobic volume first, not to more intensity. A week's focus sets its emphasis, never its entire content, so easy running, recovery and short economy work such as strides survive inside a threshold block.

When life interferes

Missed sessions are forgiven and never redistributed. Nothing is stacked onto next week to balance the numbers, because that is how a missed week becomes an injured month. Illness suspends the plan and rebuilds toward the level you had actually reached, not the level the original plan assumed.

Small adjustments can apply themselves. Changing your primary focus, rebuilding a block, or returning from injury always comes to you for approval first, with what changed, why, and which data triggered it. Anything resembling pain, illness or injury is escalated to you rather than diagnosed, because this is training guidance and not medical care.

Questions people ask

Can I train for a half on the session floor shown above?

Yes, at the finishing tier, which is what that floor is set for. Higher goal tiers raise it, because there is only so much you can ask of a small number of sessions before each one has to do two jobs badly.

My race is sooner than the minimum length. What happens?

The wizard tells you before you commit rather than after, and a short horizon is never silently compressed into something the ladder does not support. You can proceed at a lower goal tier, which carries a shorter minimum, and see honestly what that horizon can and cannot build.

Do I need a power meter or an advanced watch?

No. Everything works from pace, heart rate and rated effort, with rated effort treated as a first-class signal rather than a fallback. Missing data degrades the diagnosis, never the planning.

I always fade in the last few kilometres. Is that training or pacing?

Usually one of two things, and they are distinguishable. Either your threshold durability is short, which shows up as performance decaying faster than expected as distance grows, or you spent the opening kilometres above threshold. Those lead to different blocks, so the diagnosis matters more than the effort you put into fixing it.