If you’ve been looking for an easy way to sync your marathon workouts to your phone, I have some good news. The Marathon Excellence training plans are now supported by the awesome and free Defy Calendar Hack tool developed by “Nanreh,” a runner and cyclist in San Francisco! If you've wanted to sync your marathon workouts to your phone’s calendar app, this tool is the perfect way to do it.
Using this tool, you can set the date of your race, select your training plan, then customize the plan by dragging and dropping workouts to rearrange as needed. Then you can export an iCalendar file and sync it to your Google or Apple Calendar app!
💻 Check out the Calendar Hack tool here! 💻
The Defy Calendar Hack also supports marathon plans from Pete Pfitzinger, Hal Higdon, and the Hansons, among others, and you can export plans both in miles and kilometers.
The Defy tool makes it super easy to move workouts around during the week. For example, if you want to move your long runs to Sunday, it's an easy drag-and-drop operation on the Defy web app:
After you finalize your plan, you can export as an .iCal file and then load it into your Google Calendar or Apple Calendar app (or any other calendar app). You can even export a CSV file if you prefer old-school spreadsheets.
Now, there are a few limitations to the Calendar Hack tool: you’re still limited to 12-week or 18-week plans, you can’t edit individual workouts, and you still have to calculate your actual workout paces using my pace percentage app.
There are also some small discrepancies between the plans in the books and the plans in the Defy app, due to design constraints in the app itself (most notably, the weekly totals for kilometers are just a conversion from the mile totals, so they don’t perfectly match the mileage goals in the official plan PDFs).
I have a bigger project in the works to address these issues and more, though it will probably take me at least a month or two to get it finished up.
So, use the Calendar Hack (or the printable PDFs on the Marathon Excellence website) in the meantime as you get started with your spring marathon training!
As a reminder, for detailed workout instructions and difficulty ratings, plus much more, get your copy of Marathon Excellence here.
Find out when I have new apps coming out
If you want to know when my next training-related app comes out, sign up for my free email list below! You'll be the first to find out when I have new articles or new web apps, and you might even get early access to my newest projects.
Even if you've got your training figured out for the spring, you should check out my new book, Marathon Excellence for Everyone, for state-of-the-art strategies for fueling, pacing, heat adaptation, and post-season training reviews.
If you aren't quite ready for the marathon, I have a shorter book on a simple, scientific approach to 800m to 10k training that I published in 2013 called Modern Training Principles for Middle and Long-Distance Runners. Check it out!
More free web apps for runners
New web app: Predicting LT1 pace and Zone 2 pace from 5k time
New app for making power law predictions for race performance
New web app for calculating critical speed
New features in my pace percentage calculator
New calculator for track workouts on windy days
New web app: a fast and simple race pace calculator for runners
New app for calculating heat-adjusted paces
New and improved threshold, CV, and VO2max pace calculator
New app for calculating threshold, CV, and VO2max pace
Hello John,
Do you know if the app includes day-by-day schedule for the 12 weeks version? If so, where did they get it from?
As far as I can tell the free pdf on your website only includes workouts + total volume and the workouts don't seem to match 100% with the complete 18 week plans from the book so it's not like they could have just copied the 18 week plan and removed whole weeks.
Am I missing something or did you work directly with them for the 12 week version?
Thanks!
Yes -- I made the 12-week day-by-day schedules! So they are "legit" in that sense. They *should* match the 12 week PDFs on marathonexcellence.com almost 100% in terms of workouts, modulo some limitations in the app itself. Really it's just "take the 12 week plans and add easy days so the mileage adds up right."
John,
Thanks so much for providing so much information in this realm, loving your work. I was just gifted your book as I train for my first marathon! I love learning about training philosophies and really wanted to write my own plan based on your principles and writings. Do you think the book lends itself well to that, and if so, what would you tell someone to keep in mind as they constructed something using your book as a guide?
Thanks so much for your time, take care!
Yes - absolutely, there is a chapter that goes through how a plan gets built step-by-step, so even if you want to build up your own marathon plan from scratch, you'll find the book very useful!