Training Plan
A Training Plan is a periodized, week-by-week running program built around one event. It uses your synced activity history, your Running Tolerance, and your physiological markers to prescribe sessions. This page covers setting a plan up and reading it; the three heaviest tabs have pages of their own.
Each training event has 6 tabs, in the order you work through them:
- Event Details — define the race
- Readiness Check — assess your current preparation
- Preferences — set how hard and how much
- Plan Overview — review the generated plan and your current load
- Week Detail — work through individual weeks and schedule sessions
- Pace Plan — build race-day split targets
Event Details
The first tab defines the event. Every field except cutoff time and race start time is required.
- Event Name — the race or goal event
- Event Date — at least 1 week out. Available training weeks are counted from today
- Terrain Type — Road, Trail, or Mixed. Trail adds the trail pace plan and the cutoff time field
- Distance — 0.1 to 500 km
- Elevation Gain — total climbing, in meters
- Goal Finish Time — drives the Pace Plan and the goal realism assessment
- Cutoff Time — shown for trail events and distances over 42.2 km. Optional
- Race Start Time — shown alongside cutoff, used for time-of-day checkpoints in the pace plan
Save & Continue validates the entries and moves to the Readiness Check.
Changing the event date or distance after a plan exists means the plan has to be regenerated.
Preferences
Preferences set the character of the plan. Choose them before generating, and adjust before refreshing.
Difficulty controls how often hard sessions appear:
| Preset | Hard runs per week | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Comfortable | 1 every 2 weeks | Minimal difficulty, rarely structured long runs |
| Balanced | 1 | Moderate difficulty, some long runs with pace targets |
| Challenging | 1–2 | Regular difficulty, often structured long runs |
Training Volume controls weekly mileage and session caps. Caps scale from your event distance rather than sitting at fixed values:
| Preset | Progression | Long run cap | Easy/hard cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gradual | Gentle | 65% of event max | 65% of event max |
| Steady | Sustainable | 80% of event max | 75% of event max |
| Progressive | Steep | 95% of event max | 90% of event max |
Maximum sessions per week — 3 to 7. Fewer sessions mean longer individual runs to reach the same volume.
Suggested settings — where there is enough history, Minou reads your recent training and suggests a preset combination. Apply it or ignore it.
Generate Plan creates the plan. Refresh Plan regenerates from your current preferences, replacing the existing plan and any manual changes you made to it.
The ceilings a plan works within — long-run caps, build-week growth, back-to-back rules — are set under Basecamp Settings — Long Run.
Plan Overview
Once a plan exists, this tab shows its structure alongside your current load.
Plan summary — event countdown, distance, elevation, goal and projected and cutoff times, total weeks, and the current phase: Base, Build, Peak, Taper, or Maintain.
Progress bar — phase-colored segments for past, current, and upcoming weeks.
Weekly Commitment — historical against planned weekly volume across the plan.
Training Performance — 4 charts giving the load context:
- Training Load Focus — intensity distribution across Low Aerobic, High Aerobic, and Anaerobic, with a rolling window selector
- Training Status — On track, Maintaining, Normalizing, Underperforming, or Overreaching
- Training Load — weekly bTSS, actual history and projected plan load
- Running Tolerance — actual distance, Impact Load, Tolerance, and projected plan volume
See Dashboard & Performance for how each chart is read.
Weekly Refresh
A plan is not a fixed schedule you fall behind. When a week ends, a banner offers to refresh: Basecamp compares the bTSS you accumulated against what was prescribed, and rewrites the weeks ahead to match the athlete you are now rather than the one the plan assumed.
The comparison resolves to one trigger, checked in this order:
| Trigger | Condition | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| New LT test | A lactate threshold test was added since the last refresh | Every future session target is recalibrated to the measured thresholds |
| Missed week | No activities at all | A recovery week is inserted and the remaining weeks reflow |
| Fatigue safety | TSB below −35 | Recovery is forced into the next week regardless of what was planned |
| Intensity overreach | 2 consecutive weeks of overreaching | A deload is forced in |
| Volume excess | Actual bTSS more than 120% of prescribed | The next week is pulled back, by at most 30% |
| Volume deficit | Actual bTSS under 70% of prescribed | The next week is rebuilt from what you did, not from the missed target |
The last 2 cover the ordinary cases: a week you were too busy for, and a week that ran bigger than you planned. Both are expected, and neither leaves you behind a schedule you can no longer meet.
Adaptation always keeps your event date. It reshapes the weeks remaining rather than extending the plan, and it respects the CTL ramp cap, so catching up never means a jump the model considers unsafe.
How the phases work
The plan divides your available weeks into periodization phases:
| Phase | Purpose | Typical zone focus |
|---|---|---|
| Base | Aerobic development | 80% Z1–Z2, 20% Z3 |
| Build | Race-specific fitness | 70% Z1–Z2, 20% Z3, 10% Z4 |
| Peak | Sharpening | 65% Z1–Z2, 20% Z3, 15% Z4 |
| Taper | Pre-race recovery | Reduced volume, intensity distribution held |
| Race Week | Activation | Minimal volume, brief strides only |
Phase lengths scale with the weeks you have and your aerobic development history. Within a phase, the plan follows a build-to-deload cadence: typically 3 progressive weeks then 1 reduced week. The week types that cadence produces are covered in Week Detail.
Taper length scales with event distance — 1 week for a 10K, 2 for a half marathon, 3 for a marathon and above.
Units
Distance and pace follow your profile settings: km or miles, meters or feet, min/km or min/mi. Set them under Profile.
Limits
- No weather or temperature adjustment. Heat reduces capacity, and prescriptions do not account for it.
- One event at a time. A plan targets a single event. Racing frequently means adjusting between events by hand.
In this section
- Readiness Check — the verdict, race-day scenarios, and event-specific checks
- Week Detail — week columns, drag scheduling, and the session and week types
- Pace Plan — road splits, trail sections, and cutoff assessment