Very excited to welcome you onto the Team. I’m very much an advocate of that approach and once you get to know some of the other runners and how amazing they are I think you will be even more inspired.

It was interesting for me that you said your weaknesses were your speed and strength. They were the two obvious things missing from your weekly routine up until this point.

Simply by adding them in, I think you’ll notice some big improvements across the 20 weeks. When you do these sessions, it’s not that important. I coach on a Monday, at track, and Tuesday with the team. So those will always be two options for you each week.

If you do prefer track, and I think it’s a good option at this time of year with the lights, then the Sunday long run has to switched, that’s the only problem with doing track sessions.

It’s why I started the Tuesday session in the first place as a lot of the Team run with my group on Sunday morning, rest up on Monday and then do the intervals on the Tuesday.

Sunday is the ideal time to long run as we normally head out in the group. It’s great to have that support. The long run will get progressively longer (maximum 150 minutes) but also more challenging as the weeks go on. I’ll set you some specific half marathon sessions where you practice running at the pace you want to run in the race itself.

Then your third run will be a 60 minute easy run. Entirely up to you when you run this. A lot of the team go with the Wednesday evening Horntye run, which is great. There is also a little sub division call the bimblers, who run together on a Thursday evening. They are also welcome to new runners joining them, especially if you’re part of the team.

Friday morning with Steve’s group is a third option, but ideally maybe once or twice a month as that group does have a habit of stop starting and this could hinder progress slightly.

There really is flexibility in the plan though and you have the ability to switch up the days you run in any given week. The more consistent you can be with your schedule the better the results I have seem among the team, so something to bear in mind.

There’s always the option to include parkrun. A fast parkrun is a good replacement for an efforts session, whilst a lot of the team who run Sunday morning will do an easy parkrun the day before. It’s just always important we don’t over train as that’s when injuries occur.

Patience is very important at the start of the plan and it can take up to 8 weeks before you notice any improvement. The longer the plan goes on the more challenging the training becomes and then progress happens quicker.

On your plan spreadsheet each session has a training load. This is determined by time/distance x RPE (effort level). RPE stands for rate of perceived exertion, how much effort you are putting in, you’ll hear me talk about that a lot and see it on all the sessions.

Consistency is the name of the game though. 4 sessions per week, plus your pilates and I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you’ll get come the spring. I’m excited for you. Let’s do this.