Marathon training demands both consistency and flexibility. Sustaining long-term consistent mileage, frequency, and long runs from season to season may be the most underrated influential factor in marathon performance. But consistency doesn’t mean you always hit every single session exactly as planned – life gets in the way. Good performance comes more from sustaining week-to-week and month-to-month consistency while protecting the key principles shaping a training plan (a good base phase, not stacking back-to-back hard days, not jacking up long run distance or overall mileage too much from one week to the next, taking down weeks, tapering sensibly, etc). In other words, runners need to balance consistency with flexibility. The training plan is a guide, not the gospel. 

Here are five ways to practice flexibility in marathon training.

1. Move sessions around within a week

Day-to-day flexibility can help accommodate travel, sickness, parent duty, or other high-priority commitments. Moving sessions around is way better than just missing sessions. For example, if you usually do long runs on Sunday but are traveling all next Sunday, just swap your long run to Saturday and take Sunday off or do a short recovery run. Or if you usually do workouts on Tuesday but don’t have time next Tuesday, shift the workout to Wednesday or Thursday and adjust other sessions to balance out (eg instead of Tues/Thurs workouts, you can shift to Weds/Fri).

2. Swap cross-training for easy or recovery runs

If you’re nursing a minor running-related injury or can’t run because of safety or the weather, you can swap cycling, swimming, pool running, or elliptical for an easy run. With cycling, you need about 1.5-2x the minutes for similar aerobic benefit to easy running. You don’t want to swap all your easy runs for rides or swims, but cross-training is far preferable to no training and can give your legs a healthy break while working to maintain endurance.

3. Move down weeks to align with life demands

Down weeks are an important part of training, but you have to time them well.  Example: A runner is planning a week-long safari in the middle of his NYC Marathon block but his plan had the week before as a down week. Solution: shift the down week back a week when running is going to be restricted.

4. Adjust around tune-up races

I think the ideal tune-up race in a marathon build is a 10k 6-8 weeks before the marathon. If a plan has a tune-up race 7 weeks out but the perfect one is 8 weeks out, adjust the plan accordingly. A week ending in a 10k race can be a perfect down week, with reduced mileage (e.g. 10mi total on a Sunday between the 10k, warmup and cool down instead of 15-18mi). Obviously, you wouldn’t want a down week 8 weeks out for the 10k race and then another one right after 7 weeks out, so you should essentially just swap the weeks.

5. Cut sessions short or just take an extra day off

Yeah, that’s what I said. Some days you just don’t have the hour you need for training. If you can only get in a 30 min run instead, do that; if you can’t squeeze a run in or shift it to another day, it’s ok to just skip one. You don’t lose much fitness by missing one easy run. Obviously, you don’t want this to happen every week, but it will happen sometimes and it’s not worth beating yourself up. Over the course of 12 months, a runner who stacks three good seasons and hits 90% of their sessions will make huge progress; a runner who hits 100% of their sessions in one season, skips a season, and hits 50% in another season will make much less progress.