The Alternating-Week Marathon Block

This is a short placeholder story generated for the design demo. Replace it with a real interview.

Use it when

Your time swings from week to week. Shared custody, rotating shifts, travel every other week. Standard marathon plans assume every week looks the same, so you miss sessions on the busy weeks and feel behind all the time.

Step 1: Plan in pairs

After his divorce, Theo had his two kids every other week. He'd started running to fill evenings alone, and his GP had encouraged it alongside the other support he was getting for low mood. A standard 16-week plan kept breaking on kid weeks. So he stopped treating weeks as equal. Each kid-free week was a build week: four runs, one long run, one workout like 5 x 1 mile at 10K pace. Each kid week was a hold week: three easy runs of 30 to 45 minutes. Hold weeks also worked as recovery.

Step 2: Step the long run on build weeks

The long run only happened on kid-free Sundays. That gave him eight long runs in 16 weeks: 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, then 13 and a race. Every two weeks is enough gap to absorb a big jump. He never ran two long runs back to back.

Step 3: Find a Sunday group

Twenty miles alone is hard to finish. He joined a Leeds club's Sunday long-run group and ran with the 9:30-per-mile pace group, about 60 seconds slower than his marathon goal. He had company for the long runs and someone noticed if he didn't show up.

Step 4: Use the school run on kid weeks

Kid-week runs had to fit around drop-off and pickup. He dropped the kids at 8:45, ran 40 minutes from the school gate, and was at his desk by 9:30. No evening runs and no babysitter needed. He finished London in 3:52. The kids were at mile 23.

Try it this week

Get out your calendar for the next 16 weeks and mark each week as build or hold. Put your long run on the first build Sunday. On hold weeks, find one 40-minute window you can keep every week.