Last time I raced a half marathon was in 2024 at Boulderthon in Colorado, where I finished in 1:53:46—after following Runner’s World’s Break 2:00 training plan. Then, a few months later, I got injured, had to take a three-month hiatus, and start rebuilding my fitness from zero.
My comeback race was the 10-mile 2026 Broad Street Run in Philadelphia in May, and while my winter training was nothing but miserable, the race itself felt so great that when I was offered a bib for The SeaWheeze Half Marathon in Vancouver, I agreed to continue training and tackle the slightly longer distance.
Getting coached by Runna this time, the personalized training app that all SeaWheeze participants received free access to, I played it safe at first. Runna’s philosophy is to train based on your current ability rather than a future goal, so I entered that my last half marathon time was 2:00 (to stay on the conservative side) and instructed the app to create a plan with four runs and one strength-training session per week.
So far in this training block, though, I’ve been breezing through the prescribed workouts, including hill repeats, intervals, and an 18K long run with half of it at race pace. And since I’m currently halfway through the 10-week training plan, I started wondering: is hitting all workouts with ease a good sign, or does it mean I should set a more aggressive goal?
I am not sure I fully trust predictions because endurance races are as much mental as they’re physical. But my Garmin says I could run a half marathon in 1:54:54 right now, while my Strava states 1:55:09 and Runna stands by 1:52:11, so if we consider that all are under 2:00 already, maybe there is something to it.
Still, rather than entrust tech, I reached out to an expert to get advice.
First of All: If Training Is Going Great, You’re Doing It Right
After a challenging workout where Olympic runner Alexi Pappas couldn’t hit the splits, her coach, Ian Dubson, introduced her to the rule of thirds: training workouts should feel great one third of the time, OK the other third, and difficult for the remaining third.
But if I am not an elite runner, should this rule apply to me?
“For a lot of runners, training should feel good overall, especially early on,” says Laura Norris, a Seattle-based certified personal trainer and run coach with an M.S. in applied exercise science. “A lot of times, we get this misconception that for things to work, they should feel really difficult.” Just because training feels great, it doesn’t mean it’s not working, Norris adds; in fact, that often “means it is working; we have this fallacy that something has to hurt to work and that’s not true with running.”
It’s Not Only What You Can Do That’s Important, But How You Feel Doing It
Norris told me to consider how I feel at the end of a workout, like a threshold; do I have a bit left in the tank and could run further? Or does the pace feel so easy that I could keep at it for another half marathon? What it comes down to is whether I am having a great day or a great training block.
“The workout should feel doable, but you should reach the end feeling like maybe you can only do a couple more [intervals],” she says. “If you feel like you could go all day long at that pace, try increasing it by something conservative at first, like 5 to 10 seconds per mile, and see how that feels in the next workout,” she says. “Then reassess, because workouts should feel good, but they shouldn’t feel super easy.”
At Runner’s World, we’re big proponents of RPE—rate of perceived exertion—a subjective 1-10 scale of how a run feels. And that’s exactly what Norris recommends taking into consideration: on top of the predicted times any app has offered me, I should also check in with my body.
“The app is probably predicting it based on the workouts you’ve done and the paces you’ve hit on those, so I would then calibrate,” Norris says. “If it’s looking at these workouts and saying you could hit 1:45, then think about, ‘How do my race pace workouts feel? Do they feel like I could sustain that?’ Maybe not for a half today, but for a good distance today, you can take your subjective sense of how a pace feels and calibrate that against the tech.”
A Tune-Up Race or Run Can Help Determine Next Steps
Some people swear by race-predicted times, and then there are people like me, who are skeptical, and for us, it may be a good idea to do a time trial to better assess current fitness, Norris says.
“That’s really useful for a lot of runners if they haven’t raced recently and they’re not sure,” she says. “Hopping in a 5K for your workout of the week or doing a time trial 5K on your own will give a good sense of where your fitness is. And then you can plug that into those calculators, like the VDOT calculators.”
VDOT is a measure of your current running ability; after you enter a recent result from a race or a run, the calculator will get your current training paces.
Consider Upgrading Your Workouts Instead of the Whole Plan
One approach to consider is adding challenges to the weekly schedule, Norris says. That could mean updating workout paces, adding a few miles to weekly training, or, for example, adding hills.
“Hills will build durability, but most training plans don’t necessarily dictate adding hills, so here’s this middle ground of progressing your training without necessarily throwing away the plan you’re using and taking on a far more advanced one,” Norris says.
Review Your Goal Time When You Hit Peak Fitness
If everything has been going perfectly so far, when, within a training block, is it best to review and decide to potentially upgrade a goal time?
“The way plans are meant to progress—whether it’s a Runner’s World plan or a coach—is that you’re supposed to be at your peak fitness by race day, which means you're improving fitness up until about 10 to 14 days before,” Norris says. “I usually advise my athletes to start out with a broad goal, but then set your exact race pace based on how you’re doing two to three weeks out from the race.”
Bottom Line
No matter the approach, Norris recommends taking baby steps and staying conservative, in my case, perhaps lowering my goal by 5 minutes, or better yet, focusing on increasing the quality of some of my workouts. As I know from experience, it’s not worth pushing too much and risk another injury.
“Generally speaking, the training should feel good—it shouldn’t feel utterly fatiguing or overly taxing or super difficult to hit paces,” Norris says. “It’s better to slightly under-do your training than risk overtraining.”
Pavlína Černá, an RRCA-certified run coach and cycling enthusiast, has been with Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics since August 2021. When she doesn’t edit, she writes; when she doesn’t write, she reads or translates. In whatever time she has left, you can find her outside running, riding, or roller-skating to the beat of one of the many audiobooks on her TBL list.