How the plan adapts

Your plan is built from your race, the days a week you can run, and a recent race result or a few weeks of imported running, whichever the app has. Nothing else feeds it: no subscription tier, no engagement score, nothing that would make the plan want something from you the runner does not.

Every week is a fixed number of kilometres and a fixed set of sessions until something happens that the plan needs to answer -- a run you missed, a week you ran hard, a pain report, a flagged illness. When one of those happens, exactly one rule below decides what changes, and it always leaves you a sentence, not just a new number. The rules never make a session bigger to make up for a missed one: no cramming. A missed session is never squeezed into another day on top of what that day already asks -- a session that moves takes another day's place, and a session that is gone stays gone.

A run on the wrong day

What triggers it. A run that was not on the day a session was due, but is close enough to it in distance and effort to be the session itself -- a long run moved from Sunday to Saturday, or a threshold session run a day early.

What changes. The run counts as the session it plausibly was. Nothing about the week's kilometres or the sessions after it changes, and the session is no longer treated as missed.

…so nothing this week is treated as missed.…

  • Share of the planned long run an extra run must cover to count as it: 80%

A flagged illness

What triggers it. You flag a week as illness. Nothing is guessed from missed runs or a quiet fortnight.

What changes. The rest of an illness week you are still in becomes easy and short. The first full week after it resets to a share of the last week you ran cleanly, with no quality work, and the plan climbs back from there at its normal weekly step. A block that can no longer reach its old peak says so.

…km, easy running only, because you were ill…

…After the illness the plan now peaks at…

  • Days at or under which an illness counts as short: 7
  • Return week, short illness: 70%
  • Return week, longer illness: 50%
  • Quality sessions in the return week: 0
  • Quality sessions the week after that: 1

A week that climbed too fast

What triggers it. A completed week that either jumped past the plan's own week-to-week cap by a real margin, or whose training load was a spike against your average load over the four weeks before it.

What changes. Next week is pulled back to what you ran (or held) the week before, with one quality session instead of two and a shorter long run if the week came down. Two such weeks in a row is a forced cutback instead of a second pull-back. Either way the plan climbs back up afterwards at its normal rate.

…Next week drops to…

…Next week is a cutback,…

  • Load ratio (this week vs. the four before it) that counts as a spike: 1.5×
  • Weeks of load behind a week the average is taken over: 4
  • Quality sessions a pulled-back or cutback week may carry: 1
  • The plan's own week-to-week climb cap: 10%

A missed session

What triggers it. A session the plan scheduled with no run against it.

What changes. An easy or medium-long run is dropped rather than made up. A missed quality session or long run moves to another day this week if one is free of other hard work, or is dropped if none is. A missed quality session or long run also holds the next week at what you actually ran plus the normal step, rather than the figure the plan had already written, and the plan climbs back from there.

…is dropped because missed easy running is not made up later.…

…no day left this week can take it without crowding another hard day.…

  • The plan's own week-to-week climb cap, the same one 3.3 measures against: 10%
  • Minimum week-to-week step in kilometres: 3 km

A pain report

What triggers it. You tell the app a run hurt. Effort felt is never read for this -- a hard week that felt hard is a hard week, not a niggle.

What changes. Intensity comes out first: hard sessions inside the window become easy runs at the same distance, nothing about the kilometres moves. A second report within two weeks of the first also cuts the next two weeks to a share of what the plan (or an earlier rule) had already set. A third report in one spell stops the plan moving and says once to see a physiotherapist, until a run comes back pain-free.

…because you reported pain on…

…The plan is holding where it is until a run comes back pain-free, and this is the point to see a physiotherapist.…

  • Days a report takes the intensity out for: 7
  • A second report counts as the same niggle within: 14 days
  • What a second report leaves of the next weeks’ volume: 80%
  • Weeks the volume cut reaches: 2
  • Reports in one spell before the plan stops and says to see someone: 3

Running more than planned

What triggers it. A completed week you ran meaningfully more of than the plan's own target for it.

What changes. Nothing changes. The plan says how much more you ran and that nothing later moves for it -- crediting it forward would punish a good week, and treating it as an overreach would fire on an easy week that simply ran a little long.

…km more than planned this week. Nothing later changes: the extra is absorbed and the plan keeps its own shape.…

  • Surplus worth mentioning: 1 km
  • Rounding step a session’s distance is built to: 0.5 km

Reconciling on your own first day, and remembering what it already answered

A session due today with no run against it yet is not treated as missed until today is over -- the plan waits for the day to end before judging it. And every regeneration reconciles against the plan you were actually shown, not a fresh copy of the original: once a rule has answered something -- a hold, a pull-back, an eased week -- it does not answer the same thing again next time, and if the reason for a change stops standing (an illness flag is removed, a missing run is imported late) the weeks it touched come back to what the plan would have said without it.