The problem with a fixed plan
A 16-week PDF starts from a guess about your fitness and climbs to a peak on schedule, whatever happens on the way. When you miss a Tempo, you either drop it or cram it into the weekend. When a cold costs you a week, the plan carries on as if it hadn't. Over a block, those small mismatches add up, and they add up most in the peak weeks, where the plan expects the most of you.
What an adaptive plan should do
- Start from your own running: the pace you can hold, the kilometres you run in a normal week, your longest recent run.
- Tell you before the block starts whether the goal is realistic with the weeks you have.
- Re-plan the coming days after a missed run, without cramming the missed work into the days left.
- Keep the same safety limits after every change: how much hard running a week holds, how far the long run can grow, how fast the weekly kilometres rise.
- Leave the past alone. The weeks you have already run are done, and the plan should not rewrite them.
What it shouldn't do
Adaptive does not mean the plan reacts to everything. A plan that cuts the week after a single heavy-legged run, or adds kilometres to make up a run you cut short, is just as wrong as a fixed one. Good adaptation is mostly restraint: change what has to change, and explain it.
How Roen does it
General training information, not medical advice. For pain that does not settle, or any symptom that worries you, see a doctor or a physiotherapist.