Marathon training plans look wonderfully linear on Excel.
Week 1. Week 2. Week 3. Mileage goes up. Long runs get longer. Marathon-pace blocks get faster. Eventually you arrive in Ahmedabad and run 42.195 km exactly according to plan.
The human body apparently doesn’t use Excel.
After the knee problem in Week 6, Week 7 was supposed to be about recovery. And recovery, I discovered, has its own training plan:
Run a little. Walk a little. See what the knee says. Repeat.
I started physiotherapy and the associated exercises. Instead of hill repeats and threshold sessions, the week’s excitement consisted largely of run-walks — 9 km Tuesday, 5.2 km Wednesday, 8 km Thursday — plus cycling and strength/rehab work.
Not glamorous.
But there is something humbling about going from discussing whether 4:33/km is the right threshold pace to being pleased that your knee allowed you to jog.
Saturday: Two Steps Forward
Saturday was the first proper test.
After warming up, I managed 12 km continuously at 6:49/km.
A couple of weeks ago, 6:49/km wouldn’t even have qualified as a workout. This Saturday it felt like a result.
The knee was better. The body remembered how to run. There were 12 uninterrupted kilometres in the bank.
But the heart rate — about 80% average — also delivered a useful reminder.
Fitness doesn’t disappear in one recovery week, but neither does the body immediately return to where you left it. Injury, altered gait, reduced running, physio and general fatigue all leave fingerprints.
So, two steps forward.
And perhaps one step back.
That’s Still One Step Forward
The temptation now is obvious.
The knee feels better → resume training → make up the missed kilometres → bring back hills → bring back marathon pace → pretend Week 6 never happened.
That would probably be the easiest way of creating Week 8: Two Steps Back.
Ahmedabad is still the destination. Delhi Half is still sitting there on October 18.
But right now the most important training metric isn’t VO₂max, threshold pace or weekly mileage.
It’s whether I can run today and still have a happy knee tomorrow morning.
Week 7 wasn’t the week the marathon plan wanted.
It was the week the knee demanded.
40.8 km running. 11 km cycling. Physiotherapy. Strength work. And one cautiously optimistic 12K.
Two steps forward, one back.
Mathematically, I’m still one step closer to Ahmedabad.
