Running training plan: why yours should change every week

What a good running plan needs

Controlled volume progression (at most 10% a week), at most one hard workout a week — never two in a row —, a long run that grows slowly and never exceeds a third of the volume, down weeks every three or four, and a taper before the race. These rules have been known for decades; the problem is that a static plan can't apply them to what actually happened in your week.

If you missed Tuesday's run, the paper plan still tells you to do Thursday's intervals and Sunday's long run. A coach would say: skip the intervals, keep the long run. That decision, made every week, is the difference between progressing and getting hurt.

How the PaceOn plan is built

You connect Strava (or log runs manually), state your goal, your race date if you have one, and the days you can train. From your real volume over the last weeks, your pace and your level, the AI proposes the periodization — and a deterministic rules engine validates each workout before it enters the plan. The AI suggests; the safety rules decide.

The result is a grid of weeks by days, with every workout explained: type, distance, pace range, target effort and the purpose of that stimulus. You can drag a workout to another day, adjust the distance on the card itself and export to CSV if you want to bring it into your usual spreadsheet.

And after you run

Every run that comes in from your watch is compared with what was planned: distance, pace, effort, heart rate. If the easy run came out too fast, if the long run was cut short, if you logged pain, the plan adjusts what comes next — and shows the adjustment with the reason. Nothing changes silently.