A, B and C races: how to plan a season, not a single race

Point a single-race plan at that calendar and something breaks. Either you skip the smaller races to ”protect the training,” or you race everything flat out and arrive at your goal race cooked. There's a better way, and coaches have used it for decades. It just rarely makes it into consumer apps.

You sort your races by how much they matter.

A races are the ones you're building everything toward. You taper properly, you're rested, you go for a result. Most runners have one or two a year. This is where you want to be at your best.

B races matter, but not enough to reshape your whole plan around. You might cut back a little beforehand, but you don't do a full taper. They're a chance to practise pacing, test your fitness, and race without everything riding on it.

C races are training in a bib. No taper, no pressure. You run them tired, off the back of a normal training week. A parkrun, a club handicap, a local 10K. They're useful and they're fun, and treating them as anything more is how you sabotage the race that counts.

The point of the system is simple: not every race deserves the same preparation, and pretending they do wrecks the ones that matter.

Once you've labelled your races, the plan almost writes itself.

Your training builds in waves toward each A race, with the B and C races slotted in as sharpeners rather than interruptions. A B race six weeks out becomes a fitness test, not a detour. A C race becomes a hard session you happen to do with a number on. Nothing gets skipped, and nothing derails the main goal.

Without this, runners tend to do one of two bad things. They wrap themselves in cotton wool and skip every race until the big one, arriving unpracticed at racing. Or they empty the tank at every start line and turn up to their A race with nothing left. A, B and C is how you race often and still peak on purpose.

Then work backwards. Your hardest, most specific training sits in the weeks before each A race. The B and C races fill the gaps as controlled efforts.

This is one of the things TrainPlan was built to handle, and one we don't talk about enough. When you set up your plan, you don't just enter one race. You enter your A, B and C races, and the plan periodizes around the whole season, not a single date. It builds you toward the A race and treats the others as what they are.

And because the plan adapts week to week, a race that goes better or worse than expected feeds back in. Ran your B-race 10K far quicker than planned? That's a fitness signal the plan can use for the build toward your A race.

You don't need an app to train this way. Any runner with a calendar and some discipline can label their races and plan accordingly. But if you'd rather the plan hold the whole season in its head for you, that's the idea.