The Machine

The Wrong Day

Maybe you moved your Sunday long run to Saturday because the skies were looking bruised and nasty. The plan doesn't throw a fit. If the run is close enough, say 80% of what it asked for, the machine just nods. The rest of the week stays exactly the same. No harm, no foul.

…run counted as the…

…is treated as missed.…

• Share of the planned long run an extra run must cover to count as it: 80%

The Sickness

Then there are the health bugs. A nasty chest cold, the stomach bug, a flu variant, whatever you want to call it. The plan doesn't guess you're sick just because you lost a charging cable for your Garmin. You have to speak up. Once you wave the white flag, the rest of your week turns soft. The first week back, your volume is cut down to 70% if you were only out for a few days, and 50% if the bug lingered longer. It builds you back up, slow and steady. Easy running only, the plan whispers. Because you were ill, zero quality sessions given.

…easy running only, because you were ill…

• Days at or under which an illness counts as short: 7
• Return week, short illness: 70%
• Return week, longer illness: 50%
• Quality sessions in the return week: 0
• Quality sessions the week after that: 1

The Cost of Being Sick

Sometimes, a fever takes a bite out of your calendar that you just can't get back. If an illness means your training block can no longer reach the high-water mark it was originally built for, the plan tells you. Just once. It doesn't sugarcoat the drop, and it sure as hell can't move race day. But it only speaks up when the sickness is the true culprit. If something else is holding you back, the machine keeps its mouth shut. It refuses to blame a bad flu for a lower peak just to make you feel better.

…After the illness the plan now peaks at…

The Pride

Runners are arrogant creatures. Sometimes you look at the plan and think, I can do more. I can go faster. You spike your training load, jumping past that 10% week-to-week cap, or piling on one and a half times the load you've been carrying. You think you can get away with it. But the plan sees through you. The next week, it yanks your leash. It pulls you back to what you ran the week before. It strips away a quality session. Try it twice in a row, and it forces a cutback week.

…drops to…

…the most you completed in the four weeks before…

…because you have run beyond what the week before could carry two weeks running, and pulling back once did not hold it.…

• Load ratio (this week vs. the four before it) that counts as a spike: 1.5×
• Weeks of load behind a week the average is taken over: 4
• Quality sessions a pulled-back or cutback week may carry: 1
• The plan's own week-to-week climb cap: 10%

The Void

What happens when you just... don't go? When the alarm goes off and it's raining sideways, and you stay under the covers? The session drops into the dark. An easy run just vanishes. A missed long run or speed session might shuffle to a free day, but if there's no room without crowding another hard day? Poof. Dropped. The plan forgives one slip-up every four weeks. But make a habit of it, and it stops raising the bar. Nothing is made up later. What's lost to the dark stays in the dark.

…is dropped because missed easy running is not made up later.…

…is dropped because no day left…

…can take it without crowding another hard day.…

…and nothing else changes.…

…and its other runs come down to stay shorter than it.…

• The plan's own week-to-week climb cap, the same one 3.3 measures against: 10%
• The most weekly distance may rise over two weeks: 30%
• Weeks within which one missed or shortened session is forgiven: 4

The Long Rebuild

Left to your own devices, you will probably run yourself into the ground. It's what runners do. You get greedy, operating right on the edge of sanity and what's feasible. And that leads to overtraining, sickness, or just plain burnout. But the machine only cares that the volume dropped.

It is deaf to excuses. It builds you back up at a grinding 10% a week, the exact same gear it always uses. It starts the climb from the week you ran, and it measures your next step against exactly one thing: the biggest week you finished in the last four. If you recently put up big miles, stepping back up to them isn't a jump, so the plan goes straight back to its own figures. The engine will never elevate you by more than 10% over your four-week high.

While the engine is pulling you back up, lighter weeks keep their depth. A cutback week will never climb higher than the week right before it. There is only one exception. If you are returning off a long break, the comeback ramp escalates quicker on purpose, as long as you hit the assigned numbers. And if it was a fever that knocked your miles down in the first place? The machine knows your peak just took a hit, and it refuses to let you forget it. That warning stays pinned on the screen until you finally crawl your way out.

…because the plan climbs back from…

…at its normal rate.…

• The plan's own week-to-week climb cap: 10%
• Weeks back the plan looks for the biggest week you ran: 4

The Doubles

Tell the machine you are willing to run twice a day, and your load will be split into doubles. An easy day long enough to split gets one run in the morning, another in the evening. A workout day picks up a short 25-to-30-minute jog. But the machine has strict boundaries. The long-run day is sacred. It is always one single, unbroken effort. And no individual run will ever be longer than your once-a-day volume.

Whenever your volume drops from a missed run, an illness, or a forced cutback, the engine recalculates the rest of the board. If a scheduled double drops so low that an easy day is too short to split, the machine welds it back into a single run. If that extra jog on a workout day falls under 25 minutes, the engine kills it entirely. The machine won't make you change your clothes and get sweaty twice for a scrap of mileage. The screen tells you why your volume was cut, and those lost kilometers stay gone.

• An easy day over this becomes two runs: 13 km (8.1 mi)
• The shortest second run: 25 minutes
• A hard day's easy run: 25 to 30 minutes
• The most seven running days build to, with doubles: 160 km (99.4 mi)

The Hurt

This is the one that gives me the shivers. You tell the app you hurt. Not that the run was hard. A tight calf or sore legs are expected. No, this is pain. The bad kind.

The first time you report it, the plan strips out the intensity for a week. The hard sessions turn into easy running. Report it again within two weeks? The machine slices 20% off your volume for the next two weeks.

But if you report pain a third time... the machine stops. The gears lock up. It tells you, in no uncertain terms, to go see a physio. It won't move again until you come back clean. The plan is holding where it is, staring at you with dead eyes.

…because you reported pain on…

…The plan is holding where it is until a run comes back pain-free, and this is the point to see a physiotherapist.…

• Days a report takes the intensity out for: 7
• A second report counts as the same niggle within: 14 days
• What a second report leaves of the next weeks’ volume: 80%
• Weeks the volume cut reaches: 2
• Reports in one spell before the plan stops and says to see someone: 3

The Extra Mile

You go out and put extra miles on your shoes. Maybe the wind was at your back, or maybe you just felt like running with that fast friend of yours. The plan notices. It tells you exactly how much extra you ran, and then... it does absolutely nothing. It won't bank those miles as credit and demand more from you next week. That would just be punishing a good day. And it won't hit the panic button and treat it as a dangerous overreach, either. It knows an easy week that ran a little long is just that. It swallows the extra distance and keeps its shape.

…more than planned…

…so nothing later changes: the plan absorbs the extra and keeps its own shape.…

• Surplus worth mentioning: 1 km (0.6 mi)
• Rounding step a session’s distance is built to: 0.5 km (0.3 mi)

The Calendar

The machine only operates on the days you gave it permission to. You pick a day for the long run, and that long run stays bolted to the floor on that exact day. The hard sessions? The plan scatters them. It keeps the nasty workouts as far apart from each other as your schedule allows, and it will never drop one right after your long run if you've got another free day sitting there.

If your schedule is so tight that it forces two hard days right up against each other, the plan will warn you. Once. It'll name the day, clear as crystal. If you go out and run on a day you didn't tick, it still counts. It gets filed away as an extra run, but it doesn't move anything else. You want to change your routine? You change your days on the goal page. The second you do, the plan tears up the old map and redraws it, starting right now.

…sits the day before the long run…

The Midnight Judge

The plan never jumps the gun. If you have a run due today, and it's 5:00 PM and your shoes are still dry, it doesn't say a word. It waits. It waits for the sun to go down, for the crickets to start their racket, for the clock to strike midnight. Only when the day is dead and buried does it judge you. But it doesn't hold a grudge. If you fix a mistake, remove an illness flag, or finally sync that missing run, the plan just rewrites itself, like it never happened at all.