My goal when creating this plan is simple. Do everything in my powers to keep Lucy injury free and ready in time to complete London Marathon.

So I admit I’ve taken a very cautious approach in both your targets and volume of sessions.

This would be a good time to mention that my training plans are very flexible. Every week I’ll look at them and probably adjust 50% of my runners schedules from what the plan says. Why? Because of new information.

The constant feedback gives me so much data and knowledge of you as a runner that I’m constantly evolving the training schedules. I’ve no way of knowing how the plan will impact you or how you’ll find it, until you start to execute the sessions.

I prefer the idea of adding extra sessions if you find the training is too easy, rather than setting a demanding schedule and having to take sessions out, which could lead to knocking your confidence.

So that was my thinking when creating this training plan and I’m very hopeful that as the weeks progress and I get to know you and understand what your body can cope with, in terms of training points, then I can continue to alter the schedule.

Don’t worry too much about the day I’ve scheduled in sessions for the time being. Again we can change that straight away if that doesn’t work for you. What is important on the spreadsheet is the training pts, and trying to get you working at the right level for your fitness in this moment of time.

All the sessions will be uploaded to your dashboard for the following week and that’s all you really need to focus on in truth.

To briefly summarize the plan, the main focus will be increasing the long run slowly. At the moment I’ve got a peak long run of 210 mins, which if everything goes to plan, we might be able to stretch to 4 hours.

The first few weeks are a chance to assess the injury and ensure we keep it light. Then we continue to build your endurance before adding some speed work into the training. That will become more specific as we close in on London.

The key thing with any training plan is progressive overload. As the columns “Pts” and “Target” show that the training difficulty slowly increases as the plan evolves and we try and stay as consistent as possible from one week to the next.

Injuries normally occur when we suddenly do much more than we are used to in any given week or any given session, so my plans always try to avoid that.

The one thing I have left out for now is your home S&C that the physio prescribed. As you get stronger it might be beneficial to reduce that to 3 times per week, rather than daily, as you don’t want to overload the body.

I’ve also left plyometrics out for now. I think that’s something we would look to introduce in the future to improve times across the shorter distances. Probably the best form of plyometrics, if you have space, is a few mins of skipping per day. That’s been proven to be beneficial for runners.

If you have any questions for me at this stage just ask. I think your assessment scores highlight your potential to improve. I’m really hopeful this is the start of a long term partnership. The majority of runners I work with go on to do multiple plans with me, and hopefully that’s the case with you.