Spending a few minutes cooling down is an important part of your training. Take this nice and easy and gradually increase your speed. The interval sessions and tempo runs in your training plan will also include 10 mins or 1 mile of easy running before the faster running begins. It’s particularly important to warm up before your faster sessions. Go up and down performing some slow jogging, skipping, high knees and bum kicks for starters. So before you start running, find yourself aflat stretch of ground, around 50m long.

Warming up prepares your body for exercise and can reduce the risk of injury. Taking time to do a good warm-up is the part of training that many runners skip.

Warm up and cool down How do I warm up for a run? We’d recommend having a date in your diary, so you can hold yourself accountable to your plan – plus, you might even end up looking forward to it! You can always set yourself a date to run it virtually, but it’s worth taking a look at local half marathon races – here are our recommendations.

Still have questions? Here’s our training plans explained by an expert, or read on for a training plan glossary of terms. You also might want to think about fuelling for some of those longer training runs and for the race itself: here’s an overview of how to boost your diet for half marathon training. Scroll down for our beginner, PB and 10K to half marathon training plans:īefore you start, it’s a good idea to have a 10K under your belt already – if it’s been a while, try our quick-start plan below, or if you’d like to go back and rebuild that strength then check out our 10K training plans. Our free half marathon training plans have been created by experts to help you achieve your half marathon goals, whatever those may be. We also know that anything with the word ‘marathon’ in it can be daunting: the step up from 10K to half marathon can be a big one, and if you’ve already made it, knowing what to do to improve your time can be even harder. It’s long enough to give you a new challenge if you’ve mastered the 10K, but still manageable enough to do alongside a busy lifestyle. A half marathon is a great distance to train for.

Download plan to run a half marathon