🗂️Keep in Mind Why 'Couch to 5K' Doesn't Work for Everyone (and What You Can Do Instead)

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The “Couch to 5K” program has gotten tons of people started with running. It starts off with just small amounts of running, has a structure that’s easy to stick to, and you graduate with the ability to finish a common race distance. But the plan also has its drawbacks, and it’s not the only way to become a runner. Here’s what you should know before you give it a try—especially if you’ve already started and feel like it’s not working for you.

What is Couch to 5K?​

Originally published on now-defunct website coolrunning.com, the best place to read about Couch to 5K now is here, from the UK's National Health Service. You can download an app from that page, or look for any of the Couch to 5K apps or podcasts that break it down for you. There's also a written version here. Some of the apps you might find have slight differences in their schedules, so check that you've found a nine-week version if you want the original timeline.

Basically, there are nine weeks of walk-run workouts. The run segments get longer every week, and the walking breaks shorter. For example, here’s the first workout of week 1: "...you will begin with a brisk 5-minute walk. After this, you will alternate 1 minute of running and 1-and-a-half minutes of walking, for a total of 20 minutes." By week 4, some of your running stints are five minutes. By week 6, you’re doing 25 minutes of running without any walk breaks.

In the last week, you get a 30-minute run. Some faster beginners may be able to run five kilometers in 30 minutes, but that's not required. If you can run 30 minutes, you are definitely enough of a runner to complete the 5K distance. Some people choose to "graduate" by running a 5K race, however long that might actually take.

The good parts of Couch to 5K​

Run/walk programs like Couch to 5K have a lot going for them. Many lifelong runners (including myself!) got into the hobby through this program or one that was similar. Before we talk about the downsides, here are the reasons why it does work for the people who find success with it.

It’s easy to get started​

The best thing about Couch to 5K is that it’s approachable. If you’ve tried to run before, and pooped out within a minute or two, no worries! The first week’s workouts only ask you to run for one minute at a time. You can do that.

The short rests teach you to pace yourself (in theory, anyway)​

The timed rest intervals help, too. You’ll quickly find out that you can’t push yourself all-out for a minute and be ready to go again after just a minute and a half of walking. So you’ll learn to tone down the speed.

Ideally, this program will teach you proper pacing. When you get to that week 6 workout that asks you to jog for 25 minutes straight, you’ll think “well, I just did 10 minutes twice in my last run, with only a short break in between. If I just slow down a smidge, I’ll be able to do this no problem.” (That’s not always what happens, but we’ll save that critique for the next section.)

The gradual ramp-up gets your body used to running​

Running is harder on your body than walking or cycling, and beginning runners often get achy shins or knees if they ramp up their mileage too quickly. A run/walk plan is a reasonable way to increase running volume while building the habit of running consistently (every session is 30 minutes or so, three times a week).

Couch to 5K teaches you to follow a program​

Another big plus is that using a program switches your focus from “How fast am I?” or “Am I really a runner?” to “OK, just gotta get through this next run.” You have to trust the process if you want to progress in anything, and any good program gives you a concrete way to do that.

Why Couch to 5K often doesn’t work​

Couch to 5K is meant as an on-ramp to running. After nine weeks, you should be able to leave the program behind. But too many people find themselves stuck in the program, believing they are unable to move on and finish it.

This is what I mean by the program “not working.” The goal of Couch to 5K is not to get you to run a 5K race, although that’s a great way to celebrate finishing the program. Rather, the point of Couch to 5K (or any other run-walk beginner program) is to teach you to be a runner. And it often fails at this task.

People often finish this program still unable to run at an easy jogging pace, and think there’s something wrong with them. It’s also common to simply never finish it; I’ve seen people repeat week four over and over because they’re afraid of that continuous 20-minute run in week five.

All this is why I don't always recommend Couch to 5K for new runners. It often ends up teaching you the opposite of what you need to learn as a beginner. Only do it if you think you can resist the pitfalls, which I'll explain below:

It tempts you to turn the runs into interval training​

When you have to run and then walk, it’s natural to sprint the runs and recover on the walks. People often assume that the program is about increasing your cardio fitness so that your sprint pace on the first day becomes your long run pace at the end.

But that’s not how it works! Your cardiovascular system doesn’t adapt that quickly. The way you make it through the 30-minute run at the end is by running slower than you did for those one-minute bursts. And if you don’t learn to slow down (almost every beginning runner needs to slow the fuck down), you’ll just be beating your head against the metaphorical wall.

Browse any C25K forum and you’ll find people talking about how they "had to" repeat certain weeks, or how they “couldn’t” do all the running intervals of a given week, even week one. This is what happens when you don’t learn to slow down.

If you truly sprinted your first one-minute run on W1D1, you won’t be able to recover in time to do the next one. It’s not that you can’t run that second intervals, it’s just that you weren't prepared for it. And maybe you made it through the first three or four weeks by running intervals, but that strategy stops working when the runs get longer. If you keep failing or dropping out of C25K, this is likely why.

Couch to 5K makes you think of walking as failure​

Since C25K aims to get you running more and walking less, people start paying attention to whether and how much they’re walking during a run. And judging themselves for it. In real life, nobody stops people as they cross the finish line of a marathon to ask how many minutes of it they walked. If you covered the distance at a running or jogging pace, you ran the distance, even if you needed to walk when you got to a big hill or when you were taking a sip of water.

The last thing you need, as a beginner, is the idea that adjusting your pace to save energy is somehow a failure. You don't want to finish that big 5K race and feel like you didn't do it right because you walked a little. Walk breaks are a useful tool. It's better to keep the perspective that as long as you're moving, you haven't taken a "break" at all.

Couch to 5K doesn’t distinguish between a race and a training run​

So the program gets you from completely untrained—sitting on the couch—to running a 5K, or about three miles. Cool. But a concept that’s lost on many of C25K’s devotees is that when runners speak about “a 5K,” they mean a race. And a race is different from a training run.

Let’s say you’re a casual runner. You can do an easy five-kilometer (3.1 mile) training run any time you like. Let’s say that usually takes you about 35 minutes. After doing a bunch of those you might sign up for a local race at the 5K distance. You pay an entry fee, get a T-shirt, maybe raise money for charity. You line up at the start, and since it’s a race and not a training day, you push yourself to go faster than your usual training run. Your heart rate soars. You’re huffing and puffing. Your legs are burning as you pick up the pace to surge over the finish line. Time: 30 minutes. Hell yeah! What a good race you had.

That is running a 5K. That is what a runner means when they say they run a 30-minute 5K. They do not mean that they routinely cover five kilometers in 30 minutes every time they head out for a training run.

But C25K runners (and many beginners, to be honest) often focus on the 5K distance, and their time for a 5K distance, as a measure of their training. You should not treat your training runs like races. That would be like trying to get a better grade on a test just by taking tests over and over. Students need to crack open a book and study; runners need to run training runs at training paces.

If you didn’t like Couch to 5K, you’ll think you don’t like running​

This is probably my biggest beef with the popularity of C25K: It’s become synonymous with learning to run, and even with running.

Many C25K runners’ sense of progress is tied to the app rather than to running in general. If you tried C25K and couldn’t get past a certain week, or if you graduated and are sad that you’re still a “slow” runner, you may think that you just hate running or that you aren’t destined to be good at it.

But C25K is just one of many running programs out there. You can get started another way. (More on that in a sec.) Furthermore, when you’re finished, you can ditch it.

I see too many people finish C25K and then figure that the next step is to run C25K again but faster, or to look for a similar run-walk program that gets them up to a 10K. But that's missing the point! The whole idea of C25K is to be an on-ramp. Once you can run 30 minutes continuously, you can just go out and run a few miles a few times a week. And you can start bumping up the length of those runs or the number of them that you do, because after all, you are a runner now! Go and run!

You can now pick up a training program for any goal you want. That might be running a 10K—here's a good beginner program that starts with two- to three-mile runs three times a week—but it could also be an intermediate-level plan to train for a faster 5K time. There are plenty of runners, including collegiate and professional runners, who specialize in short and middle distances. They don’t run C25K over and over; they use other training programs that are a better fit for their goals.

Alternatives to Couch to 5K​

OK, so what else can you do?

First of all, while programs are great, it’s OK not to be on one at first. You may absolutely just head out for half an hour (or whatever timeframe feels good to you) and run and walk as the mood strikes you. We have a post here explaining this as “intuitive running,” but plenty of runners got started with something like this without ever giving it a name.

You can run on your own, and read up a bit about running, and decide what you’d like to do next. Hopefully you’ll encounter the idea that the key to running sustainably is to slow down enough that you don’t get out of breath constantly. Remember how I said I got started on a C25K-like program? After a month or so—and I assure you I was not fit and not athletic at this point in my life—I realized I was running slower and slower as the intervals got longer, and I wondered if I might be able to make it down my usual running route without stopping to walk if I jogged slow enough. I did, and shocked myself by running for 20 or 30 minutes straight when I had never previously gone more than five minutes or so.

Once you unlock that little epiphany, you can run on any schedule you please. And if you need a walk break every now and again, just take one. My first race was a 10K, and I had a ton of little 30-second walk breaks in there, just to catch my breath when I realized I’d been going too fast. I still finished with a respectable (to me) time.

All right, are you ready for a program? Good news: There are a ton out there, and you can choose the ones that make sense for your schedule and goals. Hal Higdon’s plans are free (or available on an app with free and subscription tiers, if you prefer). Here’s his Novice Base Building plan, which would make a great alternative to C25K. The first week has two runs of 1.5 miles, one 30-minute walk, and two three-mile runs. This is what our managing editor Meghan Walbert started with when she wanted to learn to like running. You can add as many walk breaks as you need to the runs.

Or maybe you’ve graduated from C25K and want the next step. This intermediate 5K plan adds some speed work (fast laps on a track, with rest breaks in between), while keeping most of the runs short and easy, and lengthening one run on the weekend (it gets as long as 7 miles by the end).

There are countless other programs out there. If you have a fitness tracker like a Garmin or Coros watch, it probably has customizable running plans you can follow. Apps like Runkeeper and Nike Run Club also have virtual coaches to guide you, and one-off workouts to mix things up if you're creating your own plan.


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And don’t forget about local running clubs. Your local Road Runners’ club or running store probably has a group that trains together. They may be able to hook you up with a coach or provide you with a written program you can follow. Spending time with other runners is also a fantastic way to learn the ins and outs of training as a runner, rather than having to figure everything out yourself when you’re starting from scratch.
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