Welcome to the Team. Really pleased you decided to sign up. Honestly running has had such a positive influence on my life.

Getting fitter and faster has been a really enjoyable journey over the past 6 years or so, but now the coaching has brought me even more joy. Hopefully you get to experience some of that.

If you can make the Tuesday evening sessions you’ll start to meet some great people, plus the plan should help you improve your times.

So I’ve started you with a 13 week plan, the focus of this is improving your parkrun time. Then if you continue beyond that point the focus would be taking that speed and adding in endurance to run a faster Hastings Half in 2026.

So what does the plan involve. Well I like to be very precise with the creation of my plan, using what is called training points. Basically the tougher the session, the more points it earn, and each week you’re looking to hit a certain target or get as close to it as possible.

I feel a weekly average of 100 pts is ideal for you right now and should be enough to help you make those gains, but equally not feel like you’re having to train too hard.

The average runs per week is 3.62, so there will a lot of weeks you’ll be doing 4 runs per week, but a lot of them are under the hour so I’m hoping availability won’t be an issue.

There’s only 2 midweek runs, including the Tuesday sessions and then I’ve got parkrun, in every week, apart from the day before HHM. It’s important not to run your fastest every time you do parkrun as you want to allow time in between quick attempts to make those improvements.

In terms of strength work, it’s great to hear you’ve been doing some already and I’ve put 3 sessions in, but all just 10 minutes. So they can be smashed out at home super quick. I’ve found these to be really beneficial to me and have made a big difference to my own running over the past few months. I’ve always been terrible at the strength stuff as I don’t enjoy it much. But now I can just stick on the TV for 10-15 minutes and job done.

Any questions just ask. In terms of feedback, the weekly feedback is the most important. Here you can let me know if you missed sessions or did extra. This is really important so then I can adjust the plan going forward, and make up for missed sessions if need be.

If you do want to leave feedback on all the runs, that’s great too and I will generally reply the following day.

So pleased to have you as part of the team and looking forward to seeing what you can do. Hopefully we’ll get the opportunity to run together at some stage as well.