Full review and revised plan, 13 September 2026; amended 18 September. Data through export 20260918145397. Vacation 19 September-2 October; the 17 September race was run.
| Week of | Runs | Actual km | Longest km | Saved target / result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 Jul | 2 | 13.49 | 9.08 | No saved target |
| 27 Jul | 4 | 28.47 | 10.02 | No saved target |
| 3 Aug | 2 | 14.37 | 10.39 | No saved target |
| 10 Aug | 5 | 21.25 | 5.39 | No saved target |
| 17 Aug | 8 | 35.05 | 4.72 | No saved target |
| 24 Aug | 6 | 38.78 | 13.07 | 35-38; 0.78 above |
| 31 Aug | 4 | 40.32 | 15.82 | 37-41; in band |
| 7 Sep | 3 | 32.26 | 17.65 | 39-42; 6.74 below |
No saved targets exist before 24 August, so earlier weeks cannot honestly be marked as plan passes or misses. Activity records cannot distinguish an unlogged session from a skipped one.
| Check | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Volume | Missed: 32.26 against 39-42 km. No Wednesday/Saturday run or separate Thursday warm-up/cool-down logged. Sunday ran 0.65 km beyond the planned 17 km. |
| Long run | Distance met: 17.646 km, 120.68 minutes, mean HR 161, maximum 176, cadence 158.7. Fuel intake, perceived effort and next-morning response are not confirmed. |
| Easy share | Recorded target missed: 33%, down from 59% and 67%. The zone cutoffs are proxies, and do not establish that 67% of the week was physiologically hard. |
| Execution | Mixed: three of five planned running days recorded; race completed and long distance reached. No automatic easy-effort pass from mean HR or drift. |
| Recovery | Pre-run readings reassuring; post-long-run recovery pending. Gym happened: 64 min at mean HR 120, followed by HRV 108% and RHR 44. Hip report improved but does not diagnose the problem. |
Net verdict: mixed. Endurance progressed. Consistency, easy-session execution and the assumptions used to interpret the data need revision. This full rewrite is triggered by the changed calendar and inconsistent method, not a diagnosis of overtraining.
The automatically generated screen below is retained as a conservative workload heuristic, not a validated injury or overtraining test. Read the worse of HRV and RHR alongside symptoms, sleep and recent effort. Its GREEN instruction applies only to a symptom-free session. AMBER means easy/shorter; RED means no hard or long run. Walk only if comfortable, not to complete a compulsory 40 minutes. Missing/stale data is not green. Never make up a missed run by compressing sessions.
HRV 151 ms against a 7-night baseline of 154 ms; resting HR 48. Thresholds below are the 25th and 10th percentiles of your own last 90 days, recomputed every time this page is generated.
| Band | HRV vs baseline | Resting HR | Run |
|---|---|---|---|
| GREEN | ≥ 92% | ≤ 48 | The session as written. |
| AMBER | 88–91% | 49–49 | Long run: drop 3 km, keep the effort easy. Threshold or race-pace session: run the distance easy. Never both cut and pushed. |
| RED | < 88% | > 49 | Walk 40 min. Move the session on a day, or lose it. |
Baseline is hrv_baseline in v_daily, the rolling mean of the last seven measured nights. Measured 22:00–08:00 local, so it always predates a morning run — it says how ready you were, never how a run was absorbed.
All distances include warm-up, faster segments and cool-down. Easy means full sentences and RPE 2-3/10; HR 140-150 is a starting cue, with sustained readings above 155 prompting you to ease off and check heat, hills and effort. Use natural cadence in every session. The numbers are guides, not quotas: shorten for symptoms, heat, terrain or travel fatigue. Optional runs are the first distance cut; remove faster segments before easy volume. The long run can also be cut.
14-21 km; 14.35 km run over three days, with Sunday still optional. Thursday was the key session and it was raced.
| Day | Session and execution | |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 14 | Plan | Rest. No gym after the two-hour run. Assess walking, stairs and the hip in the morning. |
| Actual | Rested. The morning read HRV 124 ms — 80% of baseline — and RHR 50: red, and the deepest single reading in the file since August. This is the post-long-run response the 13 September review had to record as pending. It cleared inside a day. | |
| Tue 15 | Plan | 6 km easy, first 10 minutes particularly gentle. Normal walking and symptom-free easy running are prerequisites for Thursday. |
| Actual | 6.42 km in 42.7 min at mean HR 153, max 175, cadence 160. Gated green (HRV 165 ms, 107%; RHR 43). 66% Zone 1–2 — 28.0 min easy, 14.0 Zone 3, 0.6 Zone 4. Run 0.42 km long and above the 140–150 cue. HRR60 was 34, the fastest recovery since 30 August, so it was well absorbed — but a run written easy spent a third of itself in Zone 3 again. | |
| Wed 16 | Plan | Rest. No extra openers or commute double. |
| Actual | Rested. HRV 139 ms, 92% of baseline; RHR 45 — green. | |
| Thu 17 | Plan | Race About 8.5 km total: 2 km gentle warm-up, ~5 km race, 1.5 km gentle cool-down. Hard racing requires no hip symptoms in the warm-up and a normal gait. Start controlled. |
| Actual | 7.93 km over two records. Warm-up 2.89 km in 19.8 min at mean 157 — too hard for the job, 14.3 of its 19.8 minutes in Zone 3 against an instruction to be gentle. Race 5.042 km in 25:55 at mean HR 192, max 200, cadence 165, 5:08/km: 22.6 of 25.9 zone-minutes in Zone 5, a genuinely maximal effort at 94.6% of the max 203 in force since 11 September — a hard race, and no new maximum. No cool-down logged. Gated amber on RHR 49 against a green ceiling of 48 (HRV 141 ms, 93%) and raced in full anyway. HRR60 24, HRR120 47. | |
| Fri 18 | Plan | Rest. No long run the day after racing. |
| Actual | Morning reading in: HRV 151 ms — 98% of baseline — RHR 48, green. A maximal 26 minutes cost less overnight than Sunday's two hours did. | |
| Sat 19 | Plan | Travel Vacation starts. No long run moved here. |
| Sun 20 | Plan | 6 km easy, or rest. Only if race and travel recovery allow — this is an easy return, not a long run, and it is the first thing cut. The week's band already brackets both outcomes, so skipping it is not a miss. |
21-28 km: 21-23 with two runs; 26-28 with the optional third. Long run nominally 15 km.
| Day | Session | Purpose and execution |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 21 | Rest | Walking is fine if comfortable; substantial hikes count as load. |
| Tue 22 | 7 km easy | Cap at 60 minutes. Use effort on unfamiliar routes. |
| Wed 23 | Rest | Leave space between runs. |
| Thu 24 | Optional 5 km easy | Skip first if the vacation schedule or recovery is tight. |
| Fri 25 | Rest | Prepare familiar breakfast and fuel for the endurance rehearsal. |
| Sat 26 | 14-16 km easy; cap 115 minutes | Aim around 15 km, entirely conversational with no fast finish. A 90-minute version is sufficient if tired or conditions are difficult. Practise fuel and fluids. This is two weeks before race day; no need to exceed today's 17.65 km. Shorten or stop for recurring symptoms. |
| Sun 27 | Rest | Assess the next-morning response. Vacation days may move by one day while keeping a rest day between runs; do not add sessions. |
16-20 km: 6 + optional 4 + 10. Long run 10 km. Return home 2 October.
| Day | Session | Purpose and execution |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 28 | Rest | Taper starts; no catch-up for vacation mileage. |
| Tue 29 | 6 km easy | Comfortable effort. |
| Wed 30 | Rest | Keep walking/hiking manageable. |
| Thu 1 | Optional 4 km easy | If entirely symptom-free, include 4 x 15 seconds relaxed strides with full easy recovery. These are not sprints and add no distance. |
| Fri 2 | Return travel / rest | No required run. |
| Sat 3 | 10 km easy | Last moderate-length run, seven days before the race. Move to Sunday or shorten after poor travel recovery; no hard finish. |
| Sun 4 | Rest | Unless the Saturday run was moved here; never both. |
28-30 km including the race; scheduled 29.1 km. Only 8 km before race day.
| Day | Session | Purpose and execution |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 5 | Rest | No strength session. |
| Tue 6 | 5 km total | Mostly easy. If symptom-free and recovered, include 3 x 2 minutes controlled half-marathon effort (RPE 5-6/10), separated by at least 2 minutes easy. This is a reminder, not a fitness test. |
| Wed 7 | Rest | Normal light activity. |
| Thu 8 | 3 km easy | Optional 4 x 15 seconds relaxed strides only if comfortable; included in distance. |
| Fri 9 | Rest | Familiar meals, organise kit, avoid extra sightseeing load. |
| Sat 10 | Half marathon: 21.1 km | Start controlled, use the rehearsed fuelling plan and reassess after halfway. See the method page. Symptoms override a finish-time target. |
The original plan had useful structure but was not optimal for this runner or this calendar. It tracked actual runs, protected rest days, included fuelling rehearsal and attempted a taper. Its main weaknesses were unsupported physiological certainty, conflicting updates and a peak week that no longer fits. The following recommendations are coaching judgements under uncertainty, not a claim of a uniquely optimal programme.
| Finding | Evidence and implication |
|---|---|
| Calendar and load | Travel is 19 September-2 October, with 2-3 runs per week. Thursday 17 stays. A 19 km run on Sunday 20 is impossible; moving it to Friday puts it immediately after racing. The old 43.9 km week was based on 40.8 planned, not 32.26 actual. Remove the peak week rather than compress it. |
| Weekly 10% rule | A conservative planning convention, not an established safety guarantee. A 2025 observational cohort associated injury with individual runs more than 10% longer than the prior 30-day maximum; weekly ratios were not associated. This does not establish a safe cutoff or require extending training to qualify for race distance. Study. |
| Intensity and cardiac drift | 527.2 easy / 400.2 steady / 105.1 hard minutes over 17 Aug-13 Sep: 51.1% / 38.8% / 10.2% (rounding). Weekly easy share 39%, 67%, 59%, 33%. These are HR-reserve bins, not measured ventilatory thresholds. Neither the percentages nor low drift prove the physiological intensity. The prior automatic pass below 5% is withdrawn. Use comfortable speech alongside HR. |
| Cadence | The correlation between cadence and pace does not show that forcing 153, 158 or 160 steps/min will improve efficiency. Faster running itself changes cadence. Keep natural comfortable mechanics; no gait retraining during this block. Evidence review. |
| Recovery gate | Percentiles describe the watch record; they are not validated clearance thresholds. GREEN does not clear hip symptoms. SDNN, RHR, sleep, symptoms and performance must be read together. One good morning or HRR60 does not establish that a prior session caused no cost. Monitoring evidence. |
| False causal certainty | Heat and reported under-fuelling plausibly contributed to 8 September drift; they do not exclude fatigue. Missing logged warm-up does not establish that none happened or explain the hip pain. Gym HR is not a measure of mechanical loading. Those previous causal conclusions are withdrawn. |
| Taper | The old 10 km session with 6 km at race effort on 1 Oct and 8 km with 4 km at race effort in race week were needlessly substantial for this situation. Retain brief familiar faster running if comfortable, reduce volume and avoid a new long run after returning. Research supports reduced taper volume but does not validate this exact schedule. Taper meta-analysis. |
| Fuelling | Two unspecified gels and a fixed 500 ml are not an adequate individual prescription. Count carbohydrate grams, practise 30-60 g/hour for longer runs, and adapt drinking to conditions and tolerance. AIS guidance. |
| Stale conclusions | The prior page still said the longest run was 13.07 km and nothing beyond 92 minutes was known. Today is 17.646 km in 120.68 minutes. Other sections contradicted the revised long-run ceilings, zones and strength record. Current instructions are rewritten; old verdicts remain explicitly archived. |
There is enough sustained moderate HR to justify making the remaining easy runs easier, but not enough evidence to diagnose an aerobic threshold. Sunday contained 104.2 minutes in Z3 even with the higher zone boundaries effective 11 September. Tuesday 1 September shows you can run 11.78 km at mean HR 142. Use relaxed full sentences and RPE 2-3/10, with HR roughly 140-150 as an initial guide and a prompt to ease off if persistently above 155. These are conservative working cues, not laboratory thresholds. Do not force the pace or chase a minimum HR. No automatic reclassification of Z3 as easy from negative drift.
| Week | Mean RHR | Mean HRV, ms | Mean rolling baseline, ms | Sleep hours / score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Aug | 46.6 | 145.5 | 139.6 | 7.5 / 84.1 |
| 24 Aug | 45.1 | 161.7 | 161.5 | 8.5 / 87.1 |
| 31 Aug | 46.3 | 154.9 | 156.4 | 7.2 / 79.1 |
| 7 Sep | 45.9 | 157.0 | 151.5 | 8.2 / 81.7 |
Recent RHR is stable; mean HRV rose from 154.9 to 157.0 this week while the rolling baseline fell to 151.5. From the 161.5 peak there are two consecutive weekly declines, not three. A lagging seven-night mean includes overlapping measurements and is not independent proof of excessive training. Sunday was 192 ms / 122% with RHR 41 before the run; Monday's response is unavailable. HRR60 was 15 after 120.7 minutes today versus 16 after 114.5 minutes on 5 September; 35 after the shorter 30 August run is not directly comparable. Finishing HR, walking/cool-down, posture and measurement affect it. Sleep rebounded this week. Overall: no clear systemic deterioration in these summaries; local hip tolerance remains a separate concern.
Two short races now sit either side of one long run, and they do not agree. The 10 September race was an official 4.3 km in 21:22 (watch: 4.291 km in 22:13); 17 September was 5.042 km in 25:55 at mean HR 192, max 200 — the same pace over 17% further (5:08 against 5:10/km) at a much higher mean heart rate, and the harder of the two efforts. A 1.06-exponent Riegel conversion gives 1:55 from the first and 1:58 from the second. That they corroborate each other is new, and it is worth no more than it is worth: both extrapolate more than fourfold from races under half an hour, past a distance you have never run. Against them, 13 September averaged 6:50/km for 17.65 km, which held to 21.1 km is roughly 2:24 — but that was easy running, so it is a floor rather than a race prediction. The honest range is wide and this amend does not narrow it. Nothing here justifies a fixed finish-time target, a sub-two-hour commitment or a race HR band. Race it by effort, start controlled, and reassess after the vacation rehearsal on 26 September. The gap to race distance is 3.45 km (19.6%). Do not chase a 19 km training run to make that arithmetic look safer.
Keep gym out of this short race/travel/taper block. That is a practical choice given the hip and limited recovery time, not a claim that strength is useless or that 24 hours is always insufficient. Comfortable familiar mobility is optional; do not introduce new leg exercises. Cycling, hiking and long sightseeing days count as load even though the kilometre chart excludes them. Resume a progressive strength routine after race recovery.
Historical record, retained as written. Its causal claims, drift-based reclassification, HR ceilings and recovery verdicts are superseded by the 13 September review below; they are not current instructions.
Every closed week, with a verdict. A week is net positive when it built more than it cost — the five checks are volume against band, the long run, the direction of the easy share, whether the sessions were executed as written, and whether recovery held. Four or five passing is positive; a week can meet its kilometres and still be negative.
Re-binned 2 September. The zone figures below were originally computed against max 192 and have been recomputed against 197. The verdicts are unchanged — no week flips — but the numbers the verdicts cite have moved, and the previous values are shown alongside so the record stays auditable.
| Week | Km | Band | Long | Easy | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Aug – 6 Sep Build, single runs |
40.3 | 37–41 | 15.8 | 59% |
NET POSITIVE — 4 of 5. In band, a second consecutive lifetime-best long run, and the easy runs executed properly. Cost: the threshold session's intensity. No strength day, but that was decided when the week was written, not lost. |
| 24–30 Aug Base reset |
38.8 | 35–38 | 13.1 | 67% |
NET POSITIVE — 4 of 5. Biggest week on record, best easy share on record, and a lifetime-best long run. Cost: the long run's execution. |
| Volume | Pass. 40.3 km against a 37–41 band — 109% of the low target and, unlike the week before, inside the band rather than over it. Four runs: 11.78, 8.32, 15.82, 4.39. The week looked like a miss at 35.9 km on Friday; moving Friday's easy 4 km to Sunday is what closed it, and the move was the right call rather than a lucky one — it put the easy minutes 24 h after the long run instead of the day before. |
| Long run | Pass, emphatically. 15.82 km on Saturday 5 against 15 planned — a lifetime best by 2.75 km and the first run past 100 minutes at 114.5. Second consecutive week setting the record. The gap to 21.1 km is now 5.3 km, down from 8.0 a fortnight ago. |
| Easy share | Fail — and this is the one to read carefully.
59% of 298 zone-minutes in Zone 1–2 (176 easy, 104 Zone 3, 18 Zone 4–5)
against 67% the week before, so on the stated metric it went
backwards and is still far from the 75–80% target.
Two things stop that being the whole story. First, the fall is entirely the long run: strip Saturday out and the other three runs are 99.4 easy minutes of 121.4, or 82%. Second, those 76.7 Zone 3 minutes drifted −4.1%, which is the signature of aerobically easy work — count them as easy, as the method page now does, and the week reads 85%. The metric and the plan's own physiology have come apart, and the metric is the thing that is wrong. It is still recorded as a fail, because a check you reinterpret in the week it disappoints you is not a check. |
| Execution | Split. The easy runs were executed better than any week in the file: Tuesday 97% Zone 1–2, Sunday 92%, both by effort. The long run was run without its ceiling and vindicated. Thursday's threshold was not: the shape was right — two ~9 min efforts — but the second averaged 185 against a written 168–175 and peaked at 191, 97% of max, for 6.7 minutes in a Zone 5 the session never asked for. No drift argument covers it; hard sessions keep their ceilings and their walk mechanism. Counted as a pass on balance, three sessions to one. |
| Recovery | Pass, softening. HRV ran 90 / 98 / 91 / 92% of baseline across 4–7 September and the baseline eased 158 → 153, with RHR 46 / 43 / 49 / 49. That is a dip after the largest single stimulus in the file, which is what a dip is for; the weekly baseline means are 139.6 → 161.5 → 156.4, one week down from a high and not the three that would trigger a rewrite. HRR60 was 16 bpm after the long run against 35 after the shorter, harder 30 August run — expected for 27 more minutes on feet, not a warning. |
The lesson carried forward: the easy-run problem is solved and the hard-session problem is not. Three weeks ago the diagnosis was that easy runs were run too hard. That is no longer true — it is now the written threshold and race-effort bands that get exceeded, by 10 bpm and more. The next test is Thursday's 4.3 km race, where the instruction is a ceiling of 181 and the temptation is a 5 k result.
| Volume | Pass. 38.8 km against a 35–38 band — 111% of the low target, 2% over the top. Met, with the overrun coming from a long run that went further than gated rather than from an extra session. |
| Long run | Pass. 13.07 km on Sunday 30 against 12 km planned. A lifetime best by 2.7 km, and at 86.7 minutes the longest run in the file by time — until 1 September took that two days later at 91.6. |
| Easy share | Pass. 67% of 281 minutes in Zone 1–2 — 189 easy, 57 Zone 3, 35 Zone 4–5 — against 39% the week before and 32% before that. |
| Execution | Fail. The long run was written with an HR ceiling of 150 and run at a mean of 161, peaking at 188 — 30 of 87 minutes above Zone 3. Wednesday's 8.38 km at mean HR 142 was the counter-example and re-binned reads 99% easy. |
| Recovery | Pass. HRV baseline rose across the week, 156 → 162. The dip to 144 on the 27th and 28th followed the only two double days and had cleared by the 30th (163, above baseline). HRR60 of 35 bpm after the long run is the fastest in the file. |
The lesson carried forward, restated honestly: volume is not the constraint and execution is — but execution is improving faster than the previous plan could see. Four of five checks pass, and the one that fails has since been passed twice, on 26 August and 1 September, both at mean HR 142.