Paces from your real fitness
Vertical derives your marathon-specific paces and zones from your own training data or a recent race. Easy stays easy, and your race-pace work actually lands at race pace.
A generic 16-week PDF cannot see the week you actually had. Vertical builds your marathon plan around your real training, rebuilds it when life interferes, and talks you through every decision from base to taper.
The gap
The marathon punishes plans that cannot flex. Sixteen weeks is long enough that you will get sick, travel, have a bad week, or feel unexpectedly strong, and a fixed PDF has no answer for any of it. You either grind through sessions that no longer fit or quietly fall off the plan entirely.
The other failure mode is generic paces. A plan that hands the same splits to a 3-hour and a 4-hour marathoner is guessing. Your easy runs end up too fast, your long runs leave you flat, and the quality sessions miss the zones that actually build marathon fitness.
How Vertical coaches your marathon
Vertical derives your marathon-specific paces and zones from your own training data or a recent race. Easy stays easy, and your race-pace work actually lands at race pace.
Base, build, peak and taper are sequenced toward your date. Long runs, tempo work and marathon-pace segments land where the literature says they belong, with 500-plus peer-reviewed studies behind the calls.
Lose a week to illness or a work trip, tell your coach what happened, and the block reshuffles around the days you have left. You are not re-drawing a 16-week grid by hand every time life moves.
From “is my long run long enough?” to “how should I pace the first 10k?”, get answers grounded in your training. Onboard by voice and chat with your coach the whole build.
The short version
Your long run went to 30k and your heart rate stayed controlled the whole way, a good sign the endurance is there. We will hold volume next week, then start sharpening race pace. Sub-3:30 is realistic.
In practice
You bonked at 28k. Your coach reads the run, points to the fuelling and the too-fast start, and reworks the next long run so you can practise it properly.
Taper anxiety hits and you want to cram one more hard session. Ask your coach and get a straight, science-grounded answer on why holding back now is what makes race day fast.
Vertical turns your goal into an even-effort pacing and fuelling plan for your course, and our free race-pacing tools let you rehearse the splits before you toe the line.
How it works
Tell your coach your race, your date, and your history in a short voice or chat onboarding. Connect Garmin, COROS, Polar or Suunto if you have one.
Vertical reads your training against the research corpus and gives you a straight picture of where your marathon fitness stands and what is holding your time back.
A full periodized marathon block appears, built around your limiters and your date, with every week explained.
Run your sessions, debrief each one with your coach, and let the plan flex around your real life all the way to the taper.
A PDF is fixed the day you download it. Vertical builds your plan from your own fitness and keeps changing it. Miss a run, travel, or have a great week, and the plan reshapes so you are never grinding through sessions that stopped fitting.
Tell your coach and the plan adapts around the time you lose, easing you back in gradually so you are not thrown straight into the sessions you missed. It coaches you through the disruption honestly.
Yes. Vertical works backward from your goal time, sets your training and marathon paces from your real fitness, and tells you honestly whether the goal is realistic on your current trajectory, and what it would take to get there.
It turns your goal into an even-effort pacing and fuelling strategy for the race, and our free race-pacing and fuel-planner tools let you rehearse the splits on real course profiles before race day.
It helps but is not required. Connect Garmin, COROS, Polar or Suunto for automatic run sync, or answer a few questions about your training to get started. The assessment is free either way.
Take the free assessment: about two minutes to see where your marathon fitness really stands, then your plan. No card required.
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Get your free assessment in about two minutes, then your plan. No card required.
Free · About 2 minutes · Trusted by 200+ athletes