Guide

How to train for two races in one season

You booked a half marathon in spring and a marathon in autumn. Most training plans still assume one goal race: you pick a plan, you follow it for twelve or sixteen weeks, you race, you are done. With two (or three) races a year that assumption breaks, and the usual workaround — running two plans side by side in a spreadsheet — is where the mistakes hide. Here is how to fit two races into one coherent season.

Put the calendar first, not the favourite race

When one race matters more, it is tempting to train for it and treat the other as a training run. That works until the second race is one you also want to arrive at ready. A season plan treats the races as equal blocks on one timeline: each race gets its own build, its own taper, and the recovery after it. Which race comes first is decided by the dates alone — the calendar is the boss, not your preference.

Size each taper to the race it serves

A marathon needs roughly two to three weeks of tapering; a 10K needs only a few easy days. When you merge two plans by hand, the most common error is tapering for race one as if it were the marathon, then discovering race two is three weeks later and the sharpness is gone. Taper depth should match the distance of the race in front of you — and the longer the race, the more the recovery afterwards costs you.

The weeks between races are the plan

The gap between two races decides whether the second one goes well. After a long race you need real recovery before building again; after a short one you can turn around much faster. Write the gap down explicitly: how many days of recovery, how many weeks of building, how many days of sharpening before the start line. A half marathon six weeks before a marathon, for example, is a fast recovery week, three to four weeks of solid marathon work, then a shortened taper. Races under two weeks apart are a different animal: keep everything between them easy and accept that the second race runs on the fitness of the first.

What a full season on one screen looks like

This is the problem runandgo is built for. You enter every race you have booked — date and distance — plus roughly how much you run in a week, and it lays out the whole season as one timeline: a build, a peak and a taper around each race in turn, with the recovery between them sized to the distance just run and the gap to the next start line. No race is the main one and no race is the afterthought. You see the season before paying anything, and when you add, move or drop a race, the timeline rebuilds.

See a sample season on the home page to get a feel for it — and when the planner opens, your own races are what it builds around.

runandgo is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a niche running tool like this can exist at all.