Twelve weeks, three runs a week, and a long run that climbs from two miles to six. Written for someone who can already jog a mile and has never run further — every week is below, with the distances and the pace to run them at.
Free · no signup · printable · 12 weeks, 36 runs
Plans say "beginner" and mean six different things. Here is the line this plan draws, so you can put yourself on the right side of it in about thirty seconds.
Can you jog one mile without stopping? Slowly counts. Badly counts. Having to talk yourself through the last quarter counts. If yes, start at week 1 below.
If you can't yet, don't force it — take the couch to 10K plan, which begins at 60-second jogs with walking between them and delivers you exactly here. Starting one rung too high is the most reliable way to acquire shin splints in a fortnight.
Three runs a week. Two short and easy, one longer. Run them on any three days that leave a rest day between each, and never two days back to back in the first month.
Weekly mileage runs 5 → 6 → 7 → 6.5 → 8 → 9 → 8.5 → 10 → 11 → 10 → 12.5 → race. The three numbers in bold are cutback weeks, and they are the part beginners skip. Don't. Adaptation happens in the easier week after the hard one, not during the hard one.
The temptation around week five is to add a fourth run, because week five is when it starts to feel easy. Resist it for the full twelve weeks.
Your cardiovascular system adapts in about two to three weeks. Tendons, ligaments and bone remodel over months. The gap between those two timelines is where nearly every beginner running injury lives: your lungs write a cheque your shins can't cash. Three running days with a rest day between them keeps the two roughly in step.
If you want to do more, do more of something else. Walking is free and helps. Cycling builds the same engine with none of the impact. Strength work twice a week — calves, glutes, single-leg anything — does more for your injury risk than a fourth easy run ever will.
Almost every beginner plan says "easy" and then never defines it, which is useless advice dressed as guidance. Here are two definitions that actually work.
The talk test. You should be able to speak a full sentence out loud without gasping. Not three words. A whole sentence. If you can't, you are running your easy days at tempo pace, and the cost arrives around week six as an injury rather than as fitness.
The number. If you know roughly what you'd run a 5K in today, your easy pace is in this range:
| Your current 5K time | Run your easy miles at |
|---|---|
| Slower than 40:00 | 14:00–15:30 / mile |
| 35:00 – 40:00 | 13:00–14:30 / mile |
| 30:00 – 35:00 | 12:00–13:30 / mile |
| 27:00 – 30:00 | 11:00–12:30 / mile |
| Faster than 27:00 | 10:00–11:30 / mile |
If those paces look insultingly slow, that is the correct reaction and you should run them anyway. Easy days exist to accumulate time on your feet without accumulating damage. The hard days will come later, in a plan you haven't started yet.
Every other run in the plan exists to let you keep doing this one.
The long run is the plan. The two easy runs are there to hold your fitness together between long runs, and if you only ever managed one run a week it should be this one.
It climbs two miles to six across eleven weeks, which is a touch over 10% a week with three cutbacks built in. It never reaches 6.2 on purpose. Race day supplies the last fifth of a mile, every single time, and there is no reason to spend the pounding in training to prove something you already know.
You are ready to stop being a beginner when the easy runs have stopped being an event — when a three-mile jog is something you do rather than something you complete. Usually that is a few weeks after a first 10K, not the day after it.
The signals are specific: you finish week 11 without dreading it, you can hold a conversation through the whole long run, and nothing hurts for more than a day afterwards. When all three are true, the 10K training plans hub has the intermediate 8-week build, which adds a fourth run, tempo work and intervals.
If you want the other direction instead — longer, not faster — the half marathon plan starts from exactly the base this plan leaves you with.
Eat what you always eat. Race morning is the worst possible time to try oatmeal for the first time. Something small and familiar, ninety minutes before.
Start slower than everyone around you. The first mile of a first race is always run too fast, because adrenaline makes your easy pace feel like walking. Deliberately let people pass you. You will collect most of them again after mile four.
Walk through the water stations. It costs about fifteen seconds and it buys you a working stomach.
Six miles is not the hard part. You have run six in training. The hard part is the twenty minutes beforehand, standing in a corral, deciding you have made a terrible mistake. Everyone there is thinking it.
Thirty-six runs is a lot to hold in your head. The printed version fits on two pages with the app chrome stripped out.
Twelve-week plans are not usually abandoned in week eleven. They are abandoned in week four, on a Tuesday, in the rain, when nobody would ever know.
RunMatch exists for that Tuesday. You stake your own money on finishing the block, and if you miss it the money goes to a recipient you chose in advance — a friend, your sister, anyone whose reaction you'd rather avoid. It does not come to us: RunMatch takes 0% of the pot. Or race friends for a pot and let the winner take it.
Free to download, free to race friends, 0% of the pot, 3% when you withdraw. Requires an iPhone and an Apple Watch — runs without Apple Watch heart-rate data are rejected.
Same format on all of them: every session written out, free, printable, no email.
Print the plan and start Monday. Or put a few dollars on finishing it and give week four a reason to happen.
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