When you look at our schedules in either Hansons Marathon Method or Half Marathon Method, the schedules are 18 weeks. Looking at other schedules, I’ve seen anything from 18 through 32 weeks! I personally have schedules that range from 12 to 20 weeks for our longer race distances. Why the big variations across programs? Well, there’s a lot of reasoning and the answer will probably change as you grow as a runner. With this I hope to describe to you some of the reasoning, but why having a training program that’s too long is just as detrimental of having one that is too short.

How long does it take to adapt to training?

I knew you were going to ask that! The extremely general answer would be that the newer you are to running, the faster the improvements occur. Like with most things in life, our learning curves are steep and running is no different.

How fast you adapt to training

First off, let’s approach the questions regarding the schedules in the book. The primary differences between the beginner and the advanced schedule and the beginner schedule in the book is the first few weeks. In the beginner program we don’t do any Something of Substance (SOS) days for the first few weeks. With the Advanced schedule, we jump right into SOS days after the first week. We know that it takes 4-6 weeks to fully adapt to a training stress. When I say training stress, I am referring to one of the variables of FITT.

F- Frequency (How often we are exercising)

I- Intensity (The intensity of exercise)

T- Time (The amount of time we are exercising per session)

T- Type (The type of exercise we are engaging in)

In general we know three things about training adaptation. The first is that it is individual, so we either have to work directly with each individual athlete or make some generalizations. The second is that the first generalization is that it takes roughly 10 days to experience full benefit from a single workout. This in general, as things like neuromuscular aspects of training can be experienced in a couple days, but that’s for another day. Finally, we know that in general it takes 4-6 weeks of exposure to a specific training stress to maximize the effect of that training stress.

Beginners

For the Beginner plan we are making several of assumptions at the start. These are that 1) you are running low mileage 2) Are running less than 6 days per week, 3) That you aren’t running very long per session, and 4) that you aren’t running any workouts. As we look back at FITT, we see that our assumptions involve three of the four variables in increasing fitness. Gaining fitness through training adaptation is a balance between stress and recovery. Let’s say you are attempting to start a beginning plan and are just running easy a few days per week.

For most people, that is a recipe for injury and/or overtraining.

You start the program and it calls for 5 days per week with a long run and a workout (or two) in the first week. If we were to do that, we have now altered three current variables in your training. For most people, that is a recipe for injury and/or overtraining. Making it through a training program of this nature typically ends up being more about survival than gaining fitness.

Now, if you look at our schedule with the same person, we are still adding a new stress, but we limit it to frequency and time. The intensity is left the same and the type of exercise is really a controlled variable for us. By taking that one variable away (for now), provides the beginner to establish a base fitness over the next month and in all actuality, improve their base fitness. Then from there, they have established the foundation to take the next step in training.

Now, what does this have to do with how fast we adapt to training? For the beginner, fitness will actually come pretty fast in terms of physiological fitness- VO2max, endurance,