Planning
Building a Race Season: Timing, Peaks, and Recovery
How to structure a year of racing around a goal event — periodization basics, spacing races, and using My Season to map it all out.
Start with one A race
A well-built season orbits a single goal event — your A race. This is the one you train through everything else for, the one where you want to arrive fit, fresh, and ready to perform. Everything else on your calendar is a B race (a solid effort you train through) or a C race (a tune-up or training stimulus treated as a hard workout). Without an A race, a season becomes a string of mediocre efforts with no clear peak, because you are always either undertrained or over-raced.
Pick your A race first, and work backward from its date. A marathon needs sixteen to twenty weeks of focused build; a 50K ultra needs twenty to twenty-four; a full Ironman needs twenty-four to thirty. B and C races then fill the calendar in the weeks and months before the A race, each serving a specific purpose in the build.
Understand the periodization arc
Periodization is the practice of dividing a season into phases, each with a different training emphasis. The classic arc has four phases. Base builds aerobic volume and structural strength through long, easy efforts. Build adds intensity — intervals, tempo, and race-specific work — while maintaining volume. Peak sharpens you with race-pace efforts and a gradual drop in volume. Taper reduces volume sharply in the final one to three weeks so you arrive at the start line rested and reactive.
B races sit at the end of the build or peak phase, giving you a chance to practice race execution under fatigue. C races can appear earlier, even in base, as hard workouts that break up the monotony of training. The key principle is that every race on the calendar has a known purpose and a known cost — you never race by accident.
Space your races to protect the A race
Racing is the most demanding training you do, and it requires recovery. A 10K takes roughly a week to recover from fully; a half marathon one to two weeks; a marathon three to four weeks; a 50-mile ultra four to six weeks. If you cram races too close together, you either arrive at the A race undertrained (because you were recovering instead of training) or overtrained (because you raced through insufficient recovery).
A practical rule: schedule your last hard B race no closer than three weeks before an A race for events up to a half marathon, and no closer than six weeks for a marathon or longer. Use C races as tune-ups in the final six weeks, but treat them as workouts — not all-out efforts — so they sharpen rather than deplete you.
Plan recovery and watch for burnout
The week after any race should be a down week — reduced volume, no intensity, and extra sleep. The longer and harder the race, the longer the down week. After a season's A race, take a full transition block of two to four weeks with unstructured, enjoyable activity before beginning the base phase for the next season. Athletes who skip this step accumulate fatigue across years and eventually plateau or burn out.
Watch for the quiet signals of overreaching: rising resting heart rate, disrupted sleep, mood changes, and workouts that feel harder than they should. A planned down week every third or fourth week of training — sometimes called a cutback week — prevents chronic fatigue from accumulating. My Season's countdown helps you see when a race is approaching so you can taper intentionally rather than training hard right up to the start.
Map it out in My Season
The My Season dashboard turns an abstract season plan into a visible timeline. Save your A race first — browse the directory to find it — then add your B and C races as you find them. Each saved race shows a live countdown, so you can see at a glance how many weeks remain and whether your training plan fits the timeline. If a race is too close to your A race, the countdown makes the conflict obvious — three weeks out is too late to add a marathon.
Revisit the plan monthly — the race calendar is a useful reference for spacing events. Races get cancelled, dates shift, and life intervenes. A season plan is a living document, not a contract — the value is in the structure it gives your training, not in rigid adherence. Adjust, re-space, and keep the A race as the fixed point everything else serves.