Half marathon training plan for beginners

How long you actually need

Count backwards from the long run. If your longest run right now is 8 km and you need to reach 18 km, that is ten kilometres of growth at one to two per week, plus a cutback week every fourth week, plus a two week taper. Fourteen to sixteen weeks, and there is not much room to argue with the arithmetic.

If you are already running 14 km comfortably, twelve weeks is plenty and the extra time goes into quality rather than distance. Starting from under 5 km, add a preliminary block and treat the half marathon as a five month project rather than a three month one.

Building the long run without breaking

One to two kilometres per week, then a cutback. The cutback week is the part beginners skip and the part that makes the whole thing work: three weeks of building followed by one week at roughly two thirds of the volume, which is when your body actually absorbs the previous three.

Run it slowly. Long run pace is easy pace, which for most people is 60 to 90 seconds per kilometre slower than 10K pace. The temptation to prove something on the long run is strong and it is the single most common reason first-timers arrive at week ten too tired to continue.

You do not need to run 21 km in training. Reaching 18 km is enough. Race day adrenaline, a taper and other runners around you cover the last three kilometres, and the extra fatigue from a full-distance training run costs more than the confidence it buys.

What the other runs are for

The threshold session is your one piece of quality. Twenty to thirty minutes at comfortably hard effort, broken into repetitions. It raises the pace you can sustain, which for a half marathon matters more than top-end speed.

The easy runs are recovery and volume at the same time. Thirty to forty-five minutes, conversational, and short enough that you finish willing to run again tomorrow. Their purpose is to add aerobic time without adding stress.

From about week eight, start finishing some long runs with three to five kilometres at goal race pace. Running your target pace on legs that already have 12 km in them is a rehearsal for the only part of the race that is genuinely difficult.

Pacing the race

Pick a goal pace you can defend from your training rather than one you would like to be capable of. A good rule: the pace you held for your best 10K, plus 20 to 30 seconds per kilometre.

Run the first five kilometres at that pace or a fraction slower. Everyone around you will be going out too fast, and you will pass a good number of them between kilometre 15 and the finish. The half marathon rewards patience more than any other common race distance.

Take on fluid from about 45 minutes and something with sugar in it if the race will take you longer than about 100 minutes. Practise both on your long runs. Race day is a bad time to discover how your stomach feels about a gel.

Frequently asked