Not a question, but a rant. Eight weeks ago I ran a half marathon using one of the 3 plans to successfully lower my finish time. I’ve got another one coming up in three weeks, so I asked for another plan to reduce my time even further. But apparently 11 weeks is not enough time for one of the human coach’s plans, so it offered a computer generated one. The mid-week training has been fine, with a good variety of speed workouts. However the weekend long runs have been completely insufficient. As I said, I was already at the distance conditioning for a half. It should have just kept me close to that level. Instead, it’s actually been reducing my distance as the weeks go by. And I will note, I have been hitting the goals each run.
My weekly “long runs”:
1 hour 24 minutes
1 hour 30 minutes
45 minutes
53 minutes
42 minutes
1 hour 16 minutes
1 hour 3 minutes - this week
1 hour 3 minutes (scheduled)
These are all roughly 9:20 pace, so my longest run, way back in the second week, was about 10 miles. I’m now 3 weeks from the race, in the “peaking” phase, and it’s telling me I should be doing around 7 miles for my long run. Yesterday I finally threw up my hands, ignored the plan and ran for 90 minutes. As I suspected, I was pretty gassed by the end. Next week, my final long run before the taper, it’s again telling me to run 63 minutes. I will again ignore it and try pushing it to an hour and 45 minutes in an attempt to get a last minute increase in my mileage.
This has been completely unacceptable. At worst, I just needed to maintain my fitness to do this half. Instead, this plan has me worse off than when I started. Any “adaptation” it makes is to reduce the workouts, and there doesn’t seem to be any lower limit to keep it from detraining you out of a race. Absolutely do not use the Garmin Run “Coach”.