I've added to my site a training plan for those who want to run a marathon or a half marathon and enjoy that experience by not suffering pain or extreme tiredness during and after the race. Many training plans are designed to get a runner ready in just a few weeks to run a marathon, and in meeting that goal of a short training period, those plans require that the runner endure relatively high stress during the training. In contrast, my plan involves less stress and less risk of injury because it uses a longer training period.
For example, one popular plan will get a person ready for a marathon with just 18 weeks of training. That particular plan involves high stress during the first month of training (16%, 14%, and 12% increases in long-run distance during the first three weeks), and the plan also has high stress during the remainder of the training due to fall-back weeks of reduced distance to give ones body a rest but then subsequent big jumps in distance to get to the point where the runner would have been if the fall-back weeks weren't performed. The increase after the first fall-back, for example, is an 80% jump in distance from the fall-back position, which translates to a 28% increase from the distance before the fall-back!
My plan is based on the 10% and heavy/light rules of running, and my increases in distance are 10% or less. In addition, after my fall-back weeks, my plan has the runner returning to the distance just before the fall-back instead of jumping to a new distance.
In order to provide marathon training with less stress and less risk of injury, my plan has a longer training period. It requires a minimum of 25 weeks for a marathon and 17 weeks for a half marathon. The plan is at
http://www.leigh.org/running/marathonplan.html
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