How to train for a half marathon
The half marathon is the distance most runners settle on and never leave, and for good reason. It’s long enough to demand real training but short enough that it doesn’t take over your life the way a marathon does. You can run one well on four days a week. Here’s how.
How long you need
From a base of running comfortably three times a week, 10 to 14 weeks is plenty for a first half. If you’re coming from a 5K or 10K, you already have most of what you need — you’re extending your endurance, not starting over. If you’re not running regularly yet, spend a few weeks getting consistent first; the half rewards a base more than it rewards a big final push.
The shape of a good week
Four runs covers it:
- A long run, building gradually to a peak of about 16–20 km. You don’t need to run the full 21.1 in training — getting close is enough, and longer isn’t automatically better.
- One quality session — a tempo run is the single most useful workout for the half, because half-marathon effort sits right around your threshold. This is the session that moves your race time.
- Two easy runs to fill out the aerobic base — and genuinely easy, not the grey-middle pace most people drift into.
That’s it. Resist the urge to add hard days. The half is built on endurance, and endurance is built on easy volume plus one honest hard effort a week.
How to pace 21.1 km
The half is long enough that going out too fast is punished, but short enough that you can hold a genuinely challenging effort — roughly your threshold pace, the “comfortably hard” you could sustain for about an hour to ninety minutes. Work out your target from a recent race with a pace calculator, then see exactly what each goal time asks kilometre by kilometre on our half-marathon goal pages. Aim to run the first half of the race a touch conservatively and the second half honestly. Even or slightly negative splits win halves.
The honest bit
A ten-week plan on paper assumes ten clean weeks, and almost nobody gets them. A bad night before your tempo, a week where life eats two runs, a long run that leaves you unexpectedly flat — a fixed plan can’t see any of that, so it either pushes you into a junk session or lets a missed week quietly derail the block. The question that actually matters on any given morning is whether today should be the hard session at all — and some mornings it shouldn’t.
That’s the gap Liftrun fills: it builds the full half-marathon block, then reads your recovery each morning and adapts the day to fit — keeping the tempo when you’re ready for it, moving it when you’re not, and holding you on track for race day either way. Same goal, fewer wasted weeks.
Training guidance, not medical advice. Build your long run gradually and see a professional if pain persists.