Training plan builder
A training plan that knows what your race asks of you
Built for the race almost nobody writes plans for — three legs in 24 hours — and just as happy building for a marathon, a half, a 10k or a 5k. One rule underneath: 80% of your time easy, counted in minutes at effort, anchored to a race you’ve actually run. Free, no account — the plan lives in your browser.
Your plan
Your plan appears here
Answer what you can — a recent race is the only thing this really needs. You’ll get pace zones from your own fitness, a week-by-week schedule, and, if you name a goal, honest odds of hitting it.
- 80% of your minutes easy, counted as time at effort rather than miles
- Sessions that vary — floats, progressions, broken tempos, hills, and plain steady running
- Every input moves the prediction, live, once the plan is on screen
Can you hit it?
A calibrated estimate from one anchor race and a typical training response — course, weather and race-day execution decide the rest. Training paces stay anchored to today’s fitness either way: you race the goal, you don’t train at it.
Your legs, priced by the app’s own model
Goal windows from the same Minetti-grade → Riegel → fatigue → weather model the Relay Tracker app uses for race predictions — an uncalibrated runner off your anchor. The app tightens these on race day as splits come in.
Your paces
| Effort | Feels like | Your paces | Share of your week |
|---|
Scroll sideways for later weeks →
Relay mode
Nobody writes plans for three legs in 24 hours
Marathon fitness gets you to the start line of a long relay; it doesn’t get you through leg three. Relay mode schedules the four things a road plan never asks for — with your actual legs’ distance, climb and descent pulled from the same race packs the app ships for Hood to Coast, Cascade Lakes, Bourbon Chase, Ragnar Northwest Passage and Ragnar Road Minnesota.
Doubles — run tired on purpose
In the sharpening weeks, Saturday splits in two: a morning run with quality at leg goal pace, then a second run six hours later on legs that aren’t fresh. That’s your first two legs in miniature, every week.
Downhill legs punish unready quads
If one of your legs drops meaningfully, the plan adds downhill strides and rolling routes — eccentric load on purpose, so free speed on the descent doesn’t become a race-ender two legs later.
You will race in the dark
When the race clock puts one of your legs between 10 PM and 5 AM, every other week one easy run moves to dawn or dusk, headlamp on. Pacing blind by feel is a skill, and it’s trainable.
Quality late, on fatigue
Your last leg comes after ~20 waking hours and two hard efforts. Goal paces bake that in — the same fatigue model the app predicts races with — and the doubles train exactly that skill.
Method
What the engine actually is
Paces come from your anchor. A recent race (or hard time trial) sets a Daniels-style fitness score; easy, marathon, threshold and interval paces derive from it. A second race at another distance fits your personal endurance curve on top. No perceived-fitness sliders — if the paces feel wrong, race something and re-anchor.
Race projections respect your mileage. Standard equivalence calculators are well-calibrated up to the half marathon but run 10+ minutes optimistic for most recreational marathoners — endurance is built with volume, not implied by speed (Vickers & Vertosick 2016, 2,300 runners). Projections to distances longer than your anchor here use an endurance exponent driven by weekly mileage, so the marathon number reflects the miles behind it. Goal odds move when your planned volume does — that’s the point.
Every session has a shape, and they rotate. Easy runs alternate between plain steady running, slow intervals (floats at the quick end of easy, with shuffles between), progressions and alternations; long runs add floats, progressions and marathon-pace reps; threshold work alternates cruise reps, unbroken tempos and broken sets; VO₂ days rotate 3-minute reps, hill repeats and short sharp intervals. Variety changes how the minutes are arranged, never how many of them are hard — the 80/15/5 split is the same whichever shape a week draws.
Age and gender set expectations, never paces. Your anchor already says how fast you are. Age and gender (both optional) only shape how fast fitness realistically builds and where the age-graded ceiling sits — a goal beyond ~95% of the age-graded world best gets an honest ~0, not a plan.
The push dial trades visible risk, never the easy rule. Cautious to Send-it moves three levers: weekly ramp (6–14%), peak volume (85–120% of your experience ceiling) and recovery-week depth. Harder settings raise the odds only through mileage the plan actually schedules — and every risk they add is flagged next to the dial: ramps past the ~10% guideline, peaks above what you’re accustomed to, no rest day, shallow recoveries. Rapid change in training load is the best-replicated injury correlate in recreational runners; absolute mileage on its own is not, so the flag names unaccustomed load rather than claiming danger. The risk is shown, never silently priced into the odds.
Long runways become training cycles, not a slab. Past the final build, the plan organizes extra weeks as repeating cycles — build, tune-up race or time trial, recover — because concentrated blocks with near-term checkpoints beat one endless mixed build, physiologically and psychologically. Each cycle’s crest sits a little higher than the last so there is always a new stimulus, with the true peak saved for the final block. Each tune-up re-anchors your fitness score and sharpens the goal odds.
Relay goal paces are the app’s predictions. Leg windows use the Relay Tracker app’s model — Minetti gradient costing over the leg’s sampled profile, Riegel endurance scaling, cumulative fatigue (miles, descent, sleep debt, night starts) and weather — so the site and the app never disagree about the same leg. The race clock assumes your teammates’ typical 10k and a typical start wave; both are stated on the plan and move only your night legs, not your paces.
General fitness guidance, not medical advice. Build gradually; see a professional if something hurts.