Busy Runners Keep Missing Key Workouts. Use This Training Strategy to Keep Your Marathon Progress on Track.

Your marathon training plan does not care if your flight was delayed, your kid has soccer practice, or a late meeting at work swallowed the hour you had set aside for an interval workout.It sees only a blank box where that missed workout was supposed to go.For plenty of runners, that blank box can feel like a failure. And when runners see they missed Tuesday’s track workout, they scramble to move it, try to squeeze it in the day before a weekend long run, and suddenly the week of training leaves you wrecked. The training plan that was meant to make you more confident starts leaving you feeling behind.California-based run coach Mario Fraioli—author of The Morning Shakeout, a popular running newsletter—sees this pattern often among busy runners managing demanding work schedules, travel, and family life.With these runners, Fraioli does not build a traditional calendar with each workout assigned to a specific day. Rather than prescribing a Tuesday interval session, a Friday tempo run, and a Sunday long run, he gives athletes a set of weekly objectives and ranks their sessions by priority.For Fraioli, this flexibility is not a weaker version of marathon training. It is a way to protect the work that makes a runner fitter, more durable, and better prepared for race day—even when their schedule refuses to cooperate with a traditional training schedule. Here’s how to do it.How to Prioritize Your Marathon Training“Let’s just keep the ball rolling,” Fraioli says.It is the phrase he returns to when he and an athlete are figuring out how to make an imperfect week work. The ball will not move at the same speed every week. Some weeks allow for a full long run, a quality session, and plenty of aerobic mileage. Other weeks might offer only a few short windows between flights, meetings, and family commitments.The goal is to avoid letting the ball stop.At the beginning of each week, Fraioli gives athletes an overall objective—build aerobic volume, work on race-specific fitness, maintain speed, or recover while keeping some frequency—and then ranks the training that supports it.In his weekly messages to his runners, Fraioli designates workouts with Priority 1, Priority 2, Priority 3, (and so on) labels. They are levels of importance, not workouts permanently attached to Tuesday, Friday, or Sunday. The athlete works down the list as time, energy, and recovery allow.Fraioli generally wants athletes getting out three or four times per week, even if one of those runs is short. For the marathon runners he coaches, a long run may be P1, the most important piece of the puzzle in 26.2 training. A threshold workout may slot in at P2. Easy aerobic runs, sometimes followed by strides for speed maintenance, can fill in lower priority levels.Essentially, a runner with only enough time for one major session knows which one to protect. If the long run is P1 and the threshold session is P2, the long run wins when the schedule makes doing both impossible. If the athlete can complete both, great. If not, the week can still move the marathon build forward.The hierarchy also changes across a training block, much like in a traditional plan, Fraioli explains. He often works in 16-week builds divided into four-week phases—also known as microcycles.An early block might emphasize faster, VO2 max-boosting efforts to develop efficiency, followed by a volume-focused phase in which the long run becomes P1 over tempo or interval work. In the second half of the build, marathon-specific sessions become high priority workouts before the athlete enters their pre-race taper phase.The value of the structure is that runners know which workouts matter most to their training before the week gets hectic.How to Move Workouts Around Without Sabotaging TrainingA priority-based training plan still needs rules. Fraioli is not asking runners to cram a week’s worth of work into whatever 48-hour stretch suddenly opens up, and this strategy isn’t simply ‘do whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like doing it.’He generally guides runners to separate key sessions—such as a long run and a threshold or interval workout—by at least a day and often two. If a runner has to move a P1 workout, the P3 easy run may need to move, shorten, or disappear completely.This requires runners to make real-time assessments of the options laid out in front of them. A two-hour long run might become one hour. A 45-minute window that was supposed to be an easy run might become a harder effort. An athlete who lands in an unfamiliar city with only an office park to run around may do strides or short pickups instead of forcing a complicated workout onto an unfamiliar route.The same goes for strength work. Fifteen minutes of bodyweight exercises in a hotel room is always better than skipping a planned 45-minute gym session, Fraoli says.And sometimes, the correct adjustment is to pull back, not push harder. For example, Fraioli says that if your flight gets delayed and you get only three hours of sleep, a hard workout may no longer be worth doing the next morning—even if you have enough time.Forcing a session with improper recovery would no longer be a sign of discipline. It would be a poor training decision.This distinction at the core of Fraioli’s system. He gives you flexibility but you must use it intelligently when the original plan no longer fits your schedule.How Flexible Training Can Help on Race DayFraioli’s first piece of advice for runners trying this approach is straightforward: Know your priorities before the week begins. If you don’t establish what matters most, it’s hard to make smart decisions when your calendar needs an adjustment.One way Fraioli helps athletes identify their priorities is by separating the week’s work into three buckets: the P1 session to protect, the additional harder workouts that need recovery space around them, and the efforts that they can shorten or scale down if life intervenes. For a marathoner, that might mean protecting the long run, leaving at least a day—often two—before or after a threshold workout, and treating easy mileage, strides, or strength work as more flexible.The second bit of guidance is to cultivate a more adaptable mindset. A runner with an unpredictable schedule may have to do a long run on Monday and an interval session on Friday, instead of following the familiar Wednesday speedwork, Sunday long run formula. Again, Fraioli stresses this doesn’t make your training less valuable, it just makes the schedule more responsive to your life.Similarly, you should get comfortable with a training log that does not look perfectly uniform. One week might total 50 miles, the next 40, then 45, then 35, then back to 50. There may be a week with just one quality workout with a couple short easy runs sprinkled in, followed by a substantial week with a bigger long run plus a threshold session and multiple easy runs.On paper, it can look messy. But Fraioli says a messy-looking plan is not necessarily an unproductive one.The approach is a way to keep up your progress while preventing every disruption from becoming full-blown crisis. The goal is to make the best possible decision with the time and energy available, then keep moving forward.All of this pays off on race day. Fraioli found that runners who spend their 16-week block adapting to travel, fatigue, limited time, and changing plans get repeated practice in problem-solving. You might need to do the same thing during your marathon, when the weather shifts, the course gets re-routed unexpectedly, or a pacing plan starts to unravel.The proverbial ball may not move at the same speed every week of training. But for a busy runner trying to reach the starting line fit, healthy, and ready to run fast, Fraioli’s strategy can help keep it rolling all the way through the finish line.Matt Rudisill is an Associate Service Editor who has been with Runner's World since 2025. A Nittany Lion through-and-through, Matt graduated from Penn State in 2022 with a degree in journalism and worked in communications for the university's athletic department for three years as the main contact and photographer for its nationally-ranked cross country and track & field teams. Matt was also heavily involved in communications efforts for Penn State football, men's basketball, and women's gymnastics. In his role with Runner's World, Matt has interviewed Olympians, world champions, and countless experts in the field to create service content that helps runners of all ages and experience levels train smarter and race faster. When he’s not out jogging, Matt can be found tweeting bad takes about the Phillies or watching movies.