Monday morning, two days after the marathon. You're standing at the top of the office stairs and going down backwards, one step at a time, like a crab wearing a finisher's medal. Meanwhile your head has already opened the spring planning: which half marathon, how many kilometres, intervals on Thursday? This article is about the argument between your head and your legs, and how a plan settles it.
I'm a personal trainer, and I build plans with runners that bring running and strength training together. My take: after the last race of the season, you don't take a break from the plan. You start the most important plan of the year. Recover first, then review, then build strength and base in three blocks. If you have no plan, the plan starts without you, so here is the plan.
What happens in your body after a marathon
Your muscle is measurably battered, and the numbers are slower than your head. In a study of 86 marathon runners, the blood markers for muscle damage were back to normal after about six days (CK) and eight days (LDH) (Bernat-Adell et al., 2021). Tissue takes longer: biopsies showed repair into weeks three to four (Warhol et al., 1985, men only). In eight elite runners, maximal knee-extensor strength dropped by 22 % straight after the race, and jumping power was still 12 % below baseline five days later (Petersen et al., 2007).
Fear of losing fitness is bigger than the loss itself: even with complete inactivity, maximal oxygen uptake fell by only 7 % in the first 21 days (Coyle et al., 1984, seven people), and easy movement is not complete inactivity.
Two things belong here, honestly. Infections: in the week after a marathon, 12.9 % of participants reported symptoms, compared with 2.2 % in a small comparison group of non-starters (Nieman et al., 1990, self-report). Whether an “open window” in your defences is behind this is disputed (Campbell & Turner, 2018). My conclusion, without fear: take sleep and energy seriously. And the emptiness: many people feel a hole after the finish. That's a common experience, not a diagnosis. In interviews, runners named the long focus on a single day and the lack of a new goal (Augustsson et al., 2024). If you feel low for weeks, please get help.
How I tell that the body is still in the race: stairs hurt on the way down, your legs feel heavy, your resting heart rate in the morning sits above your usual, your sleep is restless. These are markers from coaching practice, not a test.
Recover first, then review
If you review your race at the finish line, you're mostly rating your expectation. In eight ultra runners, mood after the race tracked the gap to their target time (r = −0.70) and not the effort (Micklewright et al., 2009, small study, only a hint). Memory is a poor logbook anyway: six months later, runners remembered less pain than they felt (Anunciação et al., 2022).
My method, coaching practice: wait three to seven days, then look at splits, fuelling and your training log, and write three columns. Daily form (weather, sleep, illness, stress): not controllable, tick it off. Race decisions (started too fast, skipped fuelling): changeable in the next race. Training gap (too few long runs, no strength work, no feel for speed): becomes your focus for the winter.
One of my clients wanted to run a marathon under three hours. He set the goal himself. We built the plan, he followed it, and it worked. That's a single case and proves nothing. In race weeks I see it all the time: months of training, and shortly before the start everything gets questioned. My experience, not a study: many mistakes happen only in our memory and in our heads.
The first three weeks: recovery in practice
There's no study on a three-week return scheme, and “one rest day per kilometre” is folklore: over 42 kilometres that would be 42 days, and the English version per mile would give only 26. The data on the first week partly contradict each other: 40 minutes at moderate effort on days 2, 4 and 6 did not harm the muscle markers (Martínez-Navarro et al., 2021, 64 runners), while running every day delayed strength recovery (Sherman et al., 1984, ten runners). Common ground: frequent or hard running in the first days slows you down.
This is how I build it with my athletes (coaching practice, ranges instead of daily orders):
| Week | Content |
|---|---|
| 1 | Walking, easy cycling or swimming, 20 to 30 minutes. From about day 4 to 7, optionally one or two very easy runs if stairs feel fine. |
| 2 | Three to four easy runs of 30 to 45 minutes. Strength at about half volume, plenty in reserve. |
| 3 | Four runs, one of them 60 to 75 minutes, and for the first time four to six strides at the end. Strength twice, moderate. |
What I'd never allow: intervals in weeks one and two, heavy squats in week one, and a long run over 90 minutes before week three. After a 10 km or half marathon I compress the scheme to roughly one to one and a half weeks. Don't cut calories hard now.
The plan: three blocks, twelve weeks
After that, the winter block begins: three blocks of four weeks, every fourth week a recovery week. This structure is coaching practice; nobody has tested it in recreational runners. The building blocks are supported: planned progression helps maximal strength a little (effect size 0.31 across 35 studies, Moesgaard et al., 2022), expert consensus recommends deloads roughly every four to eight weeks, and block periodization is disputed in the literature (Issurin, 2016).
| Block | Weeks | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 to 4 | Rebuild: strength once or twice at moderate load (depending on sessions), mileage back gently, strides |
| 2 | 5 to 8 | Heavier strength, broader base, short hill sprints |
| 3 | 9 to 12 | Build the base, one quality session per week |
In recovery weeks 4, 8 and 12, volume drops by about a third to a half, intensity stays, and that's where the checkpoints go. With three sessions a week: strength plus a short run, an easy run with strides, a long run. With four: strength twice, one easy run, one long run. With five: add a second easy run. With only three sessions, block 1 has one strength session, and the second joins from block 2.
Strength, mileage and speed inside the block
Strength. Winter is the one time in the running year when strength doesn't compete with mileage for recovery, and it doesn't make you slow: VO₂max and speed did not get worse in meta-analyses of runners (Llanos-Lagos et al., 2024). My template: two full-body sessions (one if you only have three); in block 1 eight to ten reps with three in reserve, in block 2 five to six, in block 3 three to five, and only one lever per week. In 2023 I trained strength wildly and without a plan, and a trainer would have helped me a lot. Stopping costs strength (Bosquet et al., 2013), so in spring you cut back to maintenance instead of dropping it.
Mileage. The ten-percent rule doesn't demonstrably protect you: among 532 beginners, 20.8 % got injured with the rule and 20.3 % without (Buist et al., 2008). In a cohort of 5,205 runners, risk was tied to single runs that clearly exceeded the longest run of the previous 30 days, and not to weekly increases (Frandsen et al., 2025, observational). After a marathon that reference is useless, because your longest run was the race. My derivation, untested: use your normal long run from base training. Your winter long run starts at about two thirds of it and grows by no more than ten minutes a week. First run more often, then longer, then the long run, speed last.
Speed. “Only easy running in winter” is half true. In a small, older study, long-term endurance fell by 21 % when trained people kept frequency and duration but cut intensity by a third (Hickson et al., 1985, different design from a winter plan). With less volume, endurance held for up to 15 weeks as long as intensity stayed (Spiering et al., 2021). My dose, coaching practice: block 1, four to six strides of 15 to 20 seconds at the end of an easy run; block 2, add six to eight hill sprints of eight to ten seconds; block 3, one quality session. I never cut the strides. They cost five minutes.
The next goal: who are you running this for?
Goal setting works (McEwan et al., 2016, d = 0.55), but most people miss their activity goals, and goals handed to you are reached even less often than goals you set yourself (Swann et al., 2026, online ahead of print). I get nervous the moment I want to prove something to someone, so I start with the most uncomfortable question: who are you running this for? Then: what should feel different next year, how many sessions are realistic from January to April, what gap did your review show, and would you still be happy if race day doesn't go well? The options: another marathon, a half marathon or 10 km for speed, a strength goal, or deliberately no race. Plan backwards from the date, and if that squeezes your winter block below eight weeks, a later race is usually better (my assessment).
When winter gets in the way
The neck check (symptoms only above the neck: go easy, below: rest) is an expert rule without a study behind it. The 2022 IOC consensus works with severity levels: most symptoms fade within one to three days, and only about 20 % of respiratory illnesses cost more than one training day (Schwellnus et al., 2022, expert consensus for athletes). “Sweating it out” is not supported (Weidner et al., 1998). My three steps: only a sniffle, no fever: normal daily life, training at most easy and short. Only a cough or headache, without fever and without chest or heart symptoms: no training, keep watching. Fever, chills, aching limbs: rest and talk to a doctor. After the illness the first session is a test at 60 to 70 % of your usual intensity, and you check how you feel after 10 to 20 minutes (IOC, 2022; extending it to 20 to 30 minutes is coaching practice). After that, my rule of thumb applies: as many easy days as you were ill, and you continue the block rather than restarting it.
No training, get it checked by a doctor: pressure, tightness or pain in the chest, racing or skipping heartbeat, unusual breathlessness or dizziness. If it happens during a session, stop immediately. The same goes for exhaustion lasting more than two to three weeks and recurring infections.
For the first dark week after the clocks change: move the long run to the weekend, put one easy run in your lunch break, put strength in the evening. Evening exercise mostly doesn't disturb sleep, only hard sessions in the last hour (Stutz et al., 2019). In 2023 I went to bed well after midnight and got up at ten at the earliest; today I'm in bed before ten at night. I live and work from Koh Phangan right now, so my tips for dark evenings come from coaching practice. When the week is full, cut in this order: extra easy runs first, then shorten the long run, then strength down to one session. Never cut first: the strides and that one strength session.
Staying consistent without a start number
Motivation won't carry you through three dark months, a fixed appointment will. In a small study, habits took a median of 66 days to become automatic, with a range from 18 to 254 days (Lally et al., 2010, not replicated), and if-then plans clearly improved follow-through (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006, d = 0.65). My structure: twelve weeks of sessions written into the calendar as if-then sentences, a ritual before each session, a minimal version for bad weeks, checkpoints in weeks four, eight and twelve, and a weekly review with three questions: what went well? What didn't? What do I change?
My day starts at six at the latest, meditation, mobility, then the rest. First plan, then act without second-guessing. The winter block is quiet, with no start number and no audience, and that's exactly why it works.
Conclusion
The off-season is neither a hole nor an extension of the season, but a block with its own job: recover for two to three weeks, review with some distance, then build strength and base over twelve weeks in three blocks, with small speed stimuli and fixed appointments. If you quietly get on with your own thing over winter, you don't start spring from zero. The recovery plan, the review sheet, the plan for 3, 4 or 5 sessions and the neck-check card are free in the Winter Block Guide (in German): comment “WINTERBLOCK” under one of my reels on Instagram.
Note: This article does not replace medical advice. Alethics does not diagnose. All weekly templates, dosages and rules of thumb (recovery weeks, the three-by-four-week structure, strength progression, mileage examples, strides, the review method, the neck-check steps, the order of cuts) are coaching practice and not study results. The studies mostly come from small groups, often men, sometimes elite runners.
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