TLDR: I want a long base phase to build volume toward a HM, but Athletica gives me an alternating base wk1 and 2 which oscillate between 5 and 4 hours of running per week with not much increase, with 1hr of strength training in the 4-hr week. Things I read suggest deloading weeks once a month, and strength sessions every week, which I’ve added.
Is Athletica limiting me because of my lack of running history/current fitness or because its base phase is structured like this? Should I just follow it or should I slowly increase eg my long runs irrespective of what the coach says forcing a larger volume and base fitness?
Sob story:
I’ve returned to running in mid-summer starting off with random running and with Athletica beginner low-volume 10k plan since end of September (say five weeks). So Athletica has about 9 weeks of my data.
My plan is to sit in a long base phase until things settle at large enough volume and then start a 1/2 marathon plan. I’m 48 and somewhat overweight now, so I hope to be in a better position to start a plan properly in 6-9 months.
Still — I like the prescribed structure A.ai gives so wanted to use it for the base phase, maybe extending the base phase every few months by delaying a race date I’ve set in the goals. But maybe this isn’t the right way to do it.
How have you asked for the plan to be set up currently, is it just “train to maintain” based on a half marathon plan?
I would think that the coach won’t push you beyond the existing 4 or 5 hours as that will hopefully maintain any level of fitness you have. You could increase this yourself each week (extend any long runs, do extra reps of any intervals you have) and let the AI know your feedback.. It should take this into account and hopefully if you feel good extend your further weeks.
Or the other option could be to set a date in the future and put a fictional half marathon race in. You can then see how the plan is going, if you feel it’s moving on a little fast swap one of the weeks out for a base week (one function I only just found out myself could be done!)
Good luck! No matter what you decide on its fantastic that you have started again so anything that you do will be beneficial!
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Actually I now have a new plan with a fake 1/2 marathon in November 2026. This gives pure base building as I described till end Jan and then begins with tempo runs and scattered build weeks. My fitness score climbs from 32 today to 45 in Feb and then peaks at 65 for the “race”.
If I train to maintain, I will get the base week 3’s with tempo runs immediately, but it is all stable and saturates fitness at 46 with a 90-minute long run over other week with the same January timeline.
I would expect to have it grow that long run further, but I am new to doing more than running without a plan. Maybe 90 mins long run is actually enough for HM? My easy pace right now is around 9:00 min/km so the distances are all a bit short. But I am willing to find out that I should just stick to this duration and wait for the weight to go down and paces to quicken.
My worry is that I will saturate after 8 weeks and then that’s it.
I can of course increase my long runs by 5-10 mins every month. But it seems like the coach should tell me this and plan.
I have the recreational level selected, but the weeks remain all low volume.
Well, the long run is a bit of a topic in the past on here to be honest, been discussed a few times.
Generally it seems like the coach will not tell you to extend it out of choice. It’s up to you to extend this yourself, give the feedback on how it feels, then ideally the coach should kick in and start to extend these automatically.
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Aha this made me look better.
Apparently I should just extend my long run when I feel ready and the volume will be adjusted upwards.
And the gem I found is that one should extend the long run when aerobic decoupling at a particular duration is <5% consistently.
This is simple enough as a go/no-go for me to use as a criterion.
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