Running

A training plan for your running group

A build for the whole season, and for every session a worked plan with drills, timings and coaching points.

A running group leaves together and is spread across the park five minutes later. Five kilometres is twenty minutes for the front of the group and closer to half an hour for the back, when the back is the part that should be out there least long. So this plan is written in minutes rather than distance, and in effort rather than pace: twenty minutes easy is twenty minutes easy for everyone.

With young runners there is a second problem. A scaled-down adult schedule is the easy mistake in this sport, and the athletics federations all say the same thing about it: fartlek, relays and mixed movement instead of interval blocks. That is built into the drills here, with a ceiling per age group on what a week is allowed to become.

What you get is the order. What each week is about, and what that means for Tuesday evening.

How a running week works

01
Two or three running days is the rhythm most groups are on, with the rest days spread between them rather than stacked at the end.
02
One session carries the hard work: intervals, hills or tempo, placed as far as possible from a race or from the long run.
03
The rest is easy, and easy here means genuinely easy. The common mistake in a running week is not too little hard running, it is easy runs done too fast.

What a drill looks like

This is one of the 92 running drills, written for the middle age group. The text you see here is the text that ends up on your session sheet.

Gears fartlek

5 to 20 minutes

One continuous playful run that touches every energy system, with the runners choosing the speeds themselves. It is speed play rather than a workout, and it is the young runner's version of the interval blocks an adult would run.

Setup: A park, field or trail loop with varied terrain that you can oversee from one spot. Walk the boundaries or point them out before the start. No watches on the runners. The run is its own warm-up and cool-down: it opens and closes in gears 1 and 2, and each end scales with how long the block is, so it covers both without eating the gear-shifting middle.
How it runs: Continuous running for the whole block, all work with no rest built in. For 8 to 12 year olds the block is 5 to 15 min; for 12 to 14 year olds it is 10 to 20 min. Name five gears, like a bicycle: 1 is walk, 2 is jog, 3 is steady run, 4 is fast run, 5 is a short burst. The first and last part of the block stay in gears 1 and 2 as the built-in warm-up and cool-down. Each end scales with the block: about 1 min each at the 5 min floor, growing to about 3 min each at the 20 min ceiling. That leaves a real gear-shifting middle whatever length you run. In that middle each runner shifts gear whenever they like, any surge, any length. Every gear has to be visited at least once in each 5 min of block time, and once in total for a block of 5 min or under. Running, jogging, walking and skipping are all allowed. Bursts stay short and relaxed: ease off when breathing turns to gasping. No set reps, no timing, no ranking. Easier: the transport relay, or 10 min using gears 1 to 3 only. Harder: you call the odd gear for everyone at once, or move the group on to the structured pyramid reps.
What to watch: Sell the image: you are shifting gears, not doing a workout.
Watch for runners stuck in one gear and prompt a shift, up or down.
Praise a good downshift as much as a surge. Recovering is part of the game.
What usually goes wrong: It turns into a race. Correction: scatter the group around the loop and repeat that the gears are personal.
Only sprinting and walking. Correction: require gears 2 and 3 to appear in every 5 min.
The group clumping behind the fastest runner. Correction: send them off in different directions around the loop.
Kit

Grass or trail rather than asphalt, and check the loop for holes and slick patches.
Show the boundaries before the start, and runners stay where you can see them.
A runner in a rapid growth spurt keeps their surges short and relaxed. Fluid available on warm days.

Where this fits

Running plans are everywhere. Ten weeks to a 5K, a block of intervals, a marathon build: anyone looking finds something sound inside ten minutes.

Those plans are written for one runner with one goal. A group is not that. Twelve people at different paces, in different weeks, with different years behind them, and you writing one session for all of them. That is the problem this was built for.

Rules, ages and limits

The rules, age categories and load limits behind the plan are the Dutch ones for now, because that is the competition structure we have built out. The drills themselves are not country-specific: a four-a-side overload game works the same anywhere, so a second country means rebuilding the rules and reusing the library. If you coach outside the Netherlands, the age bands are the part that will not match.

See whether it fits your group

Answer a few questions about your group and you have a season you can read back straight away.

Set up your team