I've been running regularly for about a year now and am planning on doing Daniels' Red Intermediate Plan this summer, with an eye towards a peaking for a 5k in the fall.
In re-reading Daniels, I have noticed what seems to be an odd, unexplained discrepancy between the phase durations in the "Fitness" plans (Chapters 11-14) and what he calls for elsewhere in the book. The fitness plans all call for a 16 week cycle, made up of 4 phases of 4 weeks each. However, on multiple occasions in other sections of the book, Daniels specifically cites at least 6 weeks as the ideal time to spend on each phase of a training cycle. In fact, in the first chapter, there's a graph that illustrates that "changing the training stress you're doing within a phase of your program too soon prevents you from achieving the maximum benefits from that phase." The chart is meant to illustrate what NOT to do, and shows training stresses changing every 4 weeks.
Given that Daniels obviously thinks that training is most effective when done in phases of at least 6 weeks, why would he develop a group of plans that are built around 4 week-long phases? It seems like a pretty big contradiction, and I haven't found any acknowledgement or explanation for it yet, at least in the book. Any ideas?