Half marathon best programme app, help finding one.

Hal Higdon is popular, Runners World do them

I used Hal Higdon and loved it.

Do an internet search of half marathon training programs. You'll find many. Most are similar to each other. Amazon has the Personal Running Trainer series: 4 weeks to a mile, 8 weeks to 5K, ? weeks to 10K, ? Weeks to a Half Marathon and ? weeks to a Marathon. I have used several of these. They seem very similar to the Couch to ? series. I've found written plans at: walkjogrun.net, and runhers.com. The internet is lousy with training plans (many free). Pick one.

BTW; walkljogrun.net has a great mapping function for your routes.

I used McMillan Running for my 1/2 training . And had good success with it.

https://www.mcmillanrunning.com/

I used Hal Higdons half marathon novice 1 plan. It worked out well.

mrp56839 wrote: »

SueInAz wrote: »

Many people swear by Hal Higdon or Jeff Galloway.

I create my own. I work backwards from race day on a calendar. I run every other day on a 2 week schedule (M/W/F/Su/Tu/Th/Sa). No running after the Wednesday of race week and only a few miles on Monday. One weekend day every other week is my "long run." Two weeks before the race, as my long run, I run 13 miles. Every other week, going backward, I step down a mile. So 4 weeks before I run 12 miles, 6 weeks before I run 11 miles, 8 weeks before I run 10 miles, etc. Every other running day I run my "base" mileage which gets progressively longer as I get closer to the race. The last few weeks before the race I run 8 miles every run except the one long run every other week. For the four weeks before that I run 7 miles, for the 4 weeks before that its 6 miles, and so on. Race season here is the winter and in the summer when it's almost always triple digits I run 3-4 miles every other day before work just to keep up my fitness level. That leads me right into my training schedule which usually starts in late August or early September depending on the date of my first race.

Good luck!

this is good advice. I'm training for my first half now (I'm 8 weeks into a 20 week program) and the plan I'm working is very similar to the one you create - except I'm only doing 3 days a week and my base mileage tops out at 5 with a progressively longer run on the weekend. The long runs increase a mile each week up to 6 and then every two weeks the long run drops back 2 miles from the highest (recovery week). So far, I like it. I look forward to the recovery week and they're often enough that I don't feel like I'm pushing my body beyond what I think it can reasonably do.

I'm in recovery right now, so this weekend's long run is only 4, but next week's long run is 7. Then 8. Then back down to 6. I've never run 7 miles... the bigger numbers are intimidating!

They're only intimidating until you run them. The whole reason for the long run is to get you past that. The base miles, and the race day adrenaline, are what carry you through the race.

It's certainly possible to run a half marathon with less training miles. What I've found, though, is that the more miles I run on a regular basis during training the faster I become. I've been running the same half marathon for 5 years now (RNR Arizona). The first one I ran fewer miles during the training period since I was very new to running. My base runs topped out at 6 miles and my longest was 11 miles, two weeks before the race. I ran that first half in 2:45. They moved the starting line and added a large hill for miles 9 and 10 a couple of years ago so the course has become a bit tougher since that race in 2012. With my longest run at 12 miles and running 7 miles for my base runs for the last few weeks I finished in 2:26 in 2015. Using the strategy I outlined earlier, with more training miles, I finished in 2:18 this year; a 39 second per mile improvement over last year. Obviously, it was a personal best but I also ran my fastest 5K and 10K, too, which was surprising. It was a very strong race for me. I'm actually hoping to start running 8 miles sooner this winter and try for regular 9 mile runs the last few weeks before the race but it can be tough with the short afternoons in December and January.