Strava Guides: How Strava Can Help You Train for a Half Marathon

If you're training for a half marathon (or simply thinking about it), there are a number of Strava features that can help you realize your goals, as Katherine Turner explains.

If you’ve been inspired by watching the world’s best athletes at the Olympics this summer and found yourself thinking that maybe you could sign up for a race, let me present to you: the half marathon. Sure, marathons might seem more popular, but, in my opinion, the half marathon is an under-appreciated distance. 

Don’t get me wrong, marathons are epic and there’s a reason they’re so popular. The big marathons like New York City and London are part race, part party. And there’s something really exciting about training for a bucket-list distance like the marathon. But the half marathon deserves its moment in the sun.

The fact it’s shorter means the training is more manageable. Not only does it take less time, but it’s also a better-stepping stone into longer runs for anyone moving up in distance from racing 5Ks or 10Ks. And if you’ve been focused on running marathons, the half is a great way to develop your speed without the shock to the system a fast 5K can be. 

RELATED: How to Train for a Half Marathon

Excited to hone your half marathon skills, and go for a new PR? Let’s take a look at the Strava features that can help you get there. 

Find Your Way

There’s no secret to getting faster. At the end of the day, it takes a commitment to running regularly. And if you’re going to spend time running, I always think it’s worth taking a beat to figure out which elements of training make you happy. One thing that makes a big difference to my enjoyment of training is the routes I run. I live somewhere hilly and it can be a slog running hills every day, so I’ve had to get creative with finding fun routes that don’t take me up the side of a mountain. 

Strava’s route planner is my favorite tool to use for planning out my runs. On your mobile, just navigate to the “Maps” tab. From here you have a few options, you could use one of the suggested routes, or you could tap on the pencil icon to create your own route. This is what I like to do as it means you can map a route to your exact needs. If you’re not sure where to go, the best guide is the heatmap. The darker the colour of the map, the more popular the route. This is especially useful if you’re in a new place and not sure of the best routes. If you travel a lot for work, this feature will become a favorite! 

RELATED: Strava Routes and Heatmap: Find New Places to Go

I like to have a few good route options in my itinerary: a couple of long run loops, one for easy long runs and one that is smooth enough that I can mix in some intensity. Then I’ll have at least a few easy day routes in my regular rotation, one that’s flatter and one that’s hillier would be ideal. And then it’s important to have a few workout options, something flat for speed work and a good hill for hill workouts. It might sound like a lot, but it can be fun discovering new places, and mixing up your routes is a great way to stay engaged throughout your half-marathon training block. 

Don’t Sleep on Speed

If you’ve been reading these Strava Guides over the past few months, you’ll already know that I am a huge fan of Strava’s Workout Analysis feature, because if you want to get faster, incorporating intensity into your training is a game changer. And while you don’t need as much speed in your legs for a half marathon as for a fast 5K, it’s still essential. The faster your top-end speed, the slower and more comfortable half-marathon race pace will feel. 

Workout Analysis helps you understand your workouts by creating a visual breakdown of your activity’s lap data including distance, average pace, time, heart rate, and pace zone. To use the feature, you will need a GPS watch capable of recording lap times, as Workout Analysis doesn’t work for autogenerated splits – these are the splits you get automatically each kilometer or mile on most watches and when you record using the Strava app. 

RELATED: Strava Guide: Features to Take Your Training to The Next Level

My favorite half-marathon workout is a classic tempo run. Now, there’s a lot of debate about what tempo pace is, and if you’re a nerd like me, you might enjoy learning about all the various definitions, but for the purpose of this article, I’ll stick to the classic advice that it should be comfortably hard. If you finish feeling like you could go another mile without having a breakdown, you’re probably not far off doing it right. 

You could split a tempo run into blocks of 5 minutes, do 30 minutes straight or incorporate it into a long run. If you’re new to tempo running, I’d suggest starting out with 4 x 5 minute blocks aiming for a pace that’s 10 - 15 seconds slower than your goal half-marathon pace.

Compliment your tempo running with some interval workouts, that allow you to run faster than your goal half marathon pace. A ladder workout where you build from 1 minute, up to around 8 minutes and then come back down, is a great way to incorporate some speed into your week. You could also experiment with hill workouts – this is especially good at the start of a training cycle when you’re trying to build strength without worrying too much about paces.  

RELATED: The 4 Most Important Run Training Sessions In Your Week

Once you’ve logged a workout, make sure you tag your activity as a “Workout”, so Strava knows to generate a “Workout Analysis” data view for you. Check out this article, to learn more about how to interpret your workout, but essentially, the darker the color of the bar, the faster you were moving. For most workouts, the goal is to either keep the “on” bars, when you’re running an interval, fairly consistently, or to gradually get faster throughout the workout. You don’t want to see the opposite – a gradual slowdown probably means you started too fast. 

And don’t forget to switch off the auto-lap feature on your watch. You don’t want your watch creating a lap mid-interval as that will mess up your workout chart. 

Keep A Track Record

Now you’re incorporating some workouts into your training, you’ll want to think about how to structure your week. Typically, most runners will do two workouts per week and a long run, with the other days easy running, cross training, or complete rest, depending on your training background. 

Sticking to some sort of weekly structure not only makes it easier to plan your week, and ensure you’re carving out the time to train, but staying consistent also leads to the biggest performance gains. And it can help ward off injury too. 

RELATED: Four Features to Help Level Up Your Training

One way I like to track my training is using the Training Log. Each activity shows up as a bubble in the calendar – the bigger the bubble, the bigger the activity. The bubbles are color-coded by sport and have different shading depending on the type of workout. You’ll also be able to see your weekly mileage totals and look back at your training history. 

Make sure to label your workouts in the activity edit screen so you can differentiate between different types of runs. Long runs will show up in a distinct shade, and speed workouts have a distinct pattern. There’s something really satisfying about seeing your Training Log gradually fill up, and it’s a good way to monitor the load on your body too. The most important thing in any training cycle is staying injury-free, so make sure you’re paying attention to your mileage totals and your activity frequency, and not increasing either too quickly