The 5 Questions to Answer Before You Ask AI for a Training Plan

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first time I asked AI for a training plan, I wasn’t training for a marathon. I was trying to figure out how to bridge from marathon fitness into my first ultra trail block, and I wanted the plan to actually account for elevation gain, not just weekly mileage. What came back read like a marathon plan with the word “trail” swapped in: sixteen weeks, four phases, a taper, all correctly labeled. Nothing about elevation. Nothing about hiking the climbs instead of running them. It didn’t know how many miles I was running that month, or whether Saturday or Sunday was my long run day. It didn’t know that my left IT band starts complaining somewhere past 90 minutes on flat ground, let alone on descents.

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The 5 Questions to Answer Before You Ask AI for a Training Plan