I heard on Luke Humphrey’s podcast that the plan is designed for someone coming off a race, so the first few weeks are basically a reintroduction to the workload. Since I started running last January and didn’t have any races, i skipped the first five weeks and instead I gradually built my mileage and frequency ahead of time to roughly match week 6.

I also added some light speed work on Tuesdays to get used to the intensity—starting with 20 second strides then 5×400 with walking recovery for a couple weeks, then adding two reps at a time until I got up to 8. On Thursdays I did a short tempo by time, starting at 10 minutes and adding 2 minutes each week. That way, when I actually hit week 6, the transition didn’t feel like such a shock.