This page provides an overview of all the Garmin Coach plans per distance, coach and goal. What kind of workouts to expect, what the longest run could be and what kind of taper the coach might have planned for you. Since the Garmin Coach plans are all adaptive, your plan may differ from what is mentioned here. Leave a comment below if you see something different in your plan! The information is gathered from my personal experience with some of the plans with Coach Greg and Coach Amy and the input from the members of the Garmin Coach Runners Community on Facebook. Garmin Coach – Greg McMillan ..read more

Sometimes life happens. Even when you are as dedicated to your Garmin Coach training plan as you can be. You may need to skip one or more workouts or you could be considering pausing your plan due to time constraints, injury or something else. What will happen to your adaptive training plan if you do? Skipping one or more Garmin Coach workout You can skip a run by deleting it from the plan or simply letting it go by without doing it. It can also happen that a run you did isn’t recognized as Coach workout and the plan just thinks you skipped it. So, what happens to the plan when you skip one or ..read more

There have been many questions about the final race day workout of the Garmin Coach plan and if it’s possible to use Garmin Courses or PacePro during the race day workout, or any other Garmin Coach workout. This article will explain how to set it up.  Table of Contents What is Garmin Courses? Garmin Courses allows you to send a route to your watch and follow that path with on screen instructions. Garmin has two versions of Garmin Courses, a basic version and full navigation.    The basic version of Garmin Courses will only show you a path on your watch screen. It’ll tell y ..read more

These are the third and fourth week of my Garmin Coach Half Marathon training plan with Coach Greg. The goal is just to complete the distance as I am not ready to give my maximum in training. These weeks bring stride repeats, progression runs and some easy runs. And some skipped runs again.  Stride repeats 10 repeats of 20 seconds high cadence, 45 second recovery I was looking forward to my first stride repeats of the plan, after already skipping the first planned strides. It didn’t happen today either. After waking up at 4 in the morning with migraine, I decided to resch ..read more

These are the first two weeks of my newest Garmin Coach training plan. I’m training with Coach Greg and aiming to complete the half marathon distance. The plan doesn’t start off great for me, I had to skip a few runs and I clearly disappointed my virtual coach.  Stride repeats 8 repeats, 20 seconds My first planned run after last week’s benchmark run, eight stride repeats of 20 seconds. The goal is to increase my cadence, but as it’s the first time in the plan my cadence goal is 150-200 spm. After I finish it the next stride repeats will be more specific.  Unfortunately, my ..read more

The last few months have been messy. In October I was ready to crush my half marathon PB, but I crashed halfway through. Pain in my knee, but my physical therapist later determined that the problem was in my hips/back. Lots of sessions followed, but not much changed. My runs got shorter and slower each week. I went from running 80K in September, to 60K in October, 30K in November and 20K in December. After a while I didn’t dare to push myself anymore, afraid I’d be in pain for several days again, just because I wanted to run. During these months, work was also extra stressful and that ..read more

My Instagram has been filled with annoyingly pretty winter pictures of snowy forests for months, I’ve been leaving comments everywhere. I want in. I have a forest nearby, but my country hasn’t seen consistent snow in years. Last winter I had to leave the country to see a little bit of snow. This year, that’s not an option, but it happened: winter arrived in the Netherlands!  For the first time in years we got real snow. Snow that stayed on the ground and didn’t turn into a mushy mess for at least several days. The sidewalks are a combination 30-40 cm deep untouched snow and s ..read more

Most of the Garmin watches come with a wrist based heart rate sensor that can give you additional perspective in your training. In the standard settings, Garmin uses a basic calculation method to determine your heart rate zones. These zones can help you see how hard you are training, but if these zones are incorrect it can also be very confusing. An unproductive training status after a great training session or a three day recovery time when you don’t feel you pushed it that hard. Why is that? I will explain the importance of setting the heart rate zones and how some of Garmin’s advanced fe ..read more

After my failed virtual half marathon, I was determined to come back for a second attempt within a few weeks. It’s been six weeks and it’s time for an update. In short (long version in the race report here): I ran my half marathon attempt with an annoying little niggle in my right knee. It wasn’t really painful, but it was there each step I took. It slowly progressed to a dull pain, but it was still easy to ignore. Right until about 10K into my planned course where I returned towards an uneven path and I felt the first sharp pain. I tried stretching, I tried walk breaks, but eventually I re ..read more

These are the last few weeks of my half marathon plan with Garmin Coach Amy towards a new PB. I have my longest run, another set of increased speed repeats and a new time trial. My morning runs are getting darker, so I got my lights out of storage again and I’m paying more attention to my outfit: bright colors and reflective signs. When it’s dark I run mostly on well-lit cycling paths and low speed roads with limited traffic and while I’m always keeping an eye out, I find it important that others can see me as well.  Easy run My run starts out in the dark, so I head out for a round in ..read more