Hansons--attainable goals off current fitness?

Every program has injuries, there’s nothing about the Hanson’s plan that makes it less injurious.

If anything the Hansons plan has you do way too much marathon pace work. Marathon pace is physiologically useless outside of specifically prepping for a marathon (too fast for aerobic development, not fast enough to develop the lactate system), and you really should only be doing meaningful marathon pace work the last 8 weeks of a training program.

Thank you. I appreciate your take. They said they start with doing 10k pace work and work their way to strength paces later on, with the reasoning that speed will get your body used to strength workouts later on. So most of the MP work even for beginner isn't until 7-10 weeks into the 18-week program.

Would you then go with Daniels, if what you're saying is true? His theories tend to focus on lactate dev and VDOT equivalencies.

bump--anyone else?

Start your training at your current fitness or maybe just a little bit faster (3:15) and progress the 5 min you need during training cycle (like 1 min every 2 weeks) and do final 6-8 weeks at 3:10. I don't see any reasons why you couldn't improve 10 min in a whole training block.

Good Luck!

Every plan has potential for injury. Not one plan can protect you from that.

train year round. One day around 10k/Hm pace, one day longer and more specific to marathon pace or long run. Consistently run decent or higher mileage. Go by feel.

Marathon pace is physiologically useless? Is this still something that people believe? Hasn't the success of Canova trained athletes and other elite marathoners basically completely disproven this notion?

Start at current fitness. Make the workouts manageable. As the program progresses, if it is working, you should notice a bump in fitness. Don't chase it, let it come to you.

If you like the idea of the Hanson's program, go for it. It's a solid program, as you noted, tons of people have run solid PRs following it. If you like the idea of the Pfitz program, go for that. It's also solid. As others said, people get injured on programs all the time. It is rarely the program's fault. It is almost always the runner.

Personally, I am a Pfitz fan. I prefer how he lays out the weeks of training (i.e. not running the exact same workout on the exact same day every week) and I like his approach to lots of moderate mileage. I don't think Hanson's has any more cumulative fatigue than other programs like Pfitz. They prescribe the same paces for long runs and medium long runs. Pftiz definitely has more miles. I don't think I ever felt so much cumulative fatigue as I did when I started doing midweek 15 mile runs the day after a tempo or a track run. I also never felt close to getting injured. It paid off big time in the race as I negative split the second half and felt exceptionally strong in the final 10k. Obviously only part of that is the program. A lot of it is how I gauged my efforts for months of training and then how I managed things on the day.

If you pick a program you believe in, and run the workouts at an appropriate pace, and set yourself up to do the same thing on race day, you will have a good day.

Also, how old are you? And how long have you been running? Those can be indicators of how much time you can drop from one race to another.