You just opened your plan for your upcoming training block, and, low and behold, you see a healthy mix of mileage, speed workouts, and long runs in the early weeks of your schedule. If you’ve prepared ...

Here’s why this training period is so important to race performance.

Theoretically, base training should be pretty painless. The whole idea is to take it easy as you rack up slow-and-steady mileage. The hard stuff, like tempo runs and threshold intervals, comes later.

If you are planning to run a marathon, having a 16- to 20-week training plan is essential for performance and minimizing ...