Running a half marathon plan from your phone

Nothing in a half marathon plan asks for hardware on your wrist. It is a table: a column of weeks, and in each row a distance and an effort. What it does need is a way to know how far you have run and how fast, while you are still running, without stopping and without staring at a screen. A phone in a pocket that speaks covers that.

Pick a published plan and keep it as the source

Pick one plan. Stay with it. One plan, written by one person, is the source for the whole block. Blending two produces a third plan that nobody wrote and nobody tested, and the blend usually lands harder than either original, since you keep the demanding session from each. Two widely used starting points, quoted from their own pages:

• The Novice 1 half marathon program runs 12 weeks, with four running days in a typical week alongside rest and cross training days, and its weekend long run starts at 4 miles and peaks at 10 miles in week 11 before race week (Hal Higdon, Novice 1 Half Marathon, fetched 2 August 2026).
• That page also states an entry requirement, the ability to run 3 miles, three to four times a week (Hal Higdon, Novice 1 Half Marathon). If you are not there yet, the NHS Couch to 5K plan is described as a free plan for absolute beginners, running 3 times a week over 9 weeks or longer (NHS, Get running with Couch to 5K, fetched 2 August 2026).

Then put the table somewhere you already open daily: a note, a printed sheet, a calendar with one event per session. The week should exist in exactly one place, so a bad night does not quietly become a rewritten plan.

What the phone has to do during a session

Three jobs. That is the whole list.

• Measure distance and time from the start of the session to the end, without you touching it in between.
• Report both often enough that you can still correct the run while it is happening.
• Deliver that report to your ears. Looking down changes your posture and your pace, and your attention goes with them.

Runflake's answers to that list are on the record. It is phone only, and a watch is not required for distance, pace, splits, cadence or elevation. The distance announcement follows one fixed order every time: distance, then time, then average pace, each introduced by its label, and in metric it fires on every completed kilometre, with the 1,000 m lap length a fixed constant in the signal config, not a user setting. Miles are fully supported, so in imperial the announcement comes on every whole mile, 1,609.344 m, and the closing words are per mile instead of per kilometer. It keeps speaking with the screen off and the phone in your pocket, and announcements are heard even with the iPhone silent switch on, which is deliberate.

That combination is the part that matters across a training block, because a plan that needs a hand on the phone is one you quietly stop following.

Distance three kilometers. Time fifteen minutes forty-two seconds. Average pace five minutes fourteen seconds per kilometer.

A three kilometre split, spoken in English

If you are assembling this for the first time, what a phone can and cannot do on a run covers the measurement side. The listening side is in setting up audio cues.

Easy runs by ear instead of by glance

Easy is a feel, not a screen number. Most of the sessions in a half marathon plan are easy runs, and Hal Higdon's Novice 1 page puts the check in one line (Hal Higdon, Novice 1 Half Marathon).

Run at a comfortable pace, a conversational pace. If you can't do that, you're running too fast.

Hal Higdon, Novice 1 Half Marathon

So treat the spoken split as an audit rather than a target. Hearing average pace at every kilometre tells you the shape of the run early, and a first kilometre that came back quicker than the session was meant to be costs nothing to fix at that point. The same information most of the way through the run costs you the session. Cadence is the second number worth having on easy days, and it points at a different fix: at a given pace a lower step rate means a longer stride, which is a form question rather than a fitness one. It is a figure you read on the phone rather than one that is announced, so it belongs to the review after the session. Reading cadence without a watch explains where a phone gets it and what it is worth.

Interval and tempo sessions without looking down

A screen ruins these sessions fastest. Intervals and tempo runs are where a plan gets specific, and watching a countdown makes you run the clock instead of the effort. It puts your eyes anywhere but the path ahead.

1. Decide the whole session before you leave: warm up, repetitions, work, recovery, cool down. A session improvised halfway through is a fartlek, which is fine, but it is not what the plan asked for.
2. Start each repetition from a sound, not from a tap you had to find. If the phase change is announced, you run the first ten seconds of the effort properly instead of fumbling.
3. Let each phase end in the unit the plan wrote it in. Track sessions are usually written as a distance, not as minutes, and converting one into the other gives you a different workout at a different effort.
4. Know where the early exit is before you start. A repetition that ends at a distance does not end at all if the distance stops accruing.

Any timer that speaks its phase changes will do this. What differs between tools is whether a repetition is understood as a running phase with a distance or a duration, or only as a generic countdown. That split is covered in interval apps versus HIIT timers.

The long run, and the two things that fail on it

Power and sound, not your training.

Two things fail on the long weekend run. It is where a phone only setup gets tested, because it lasts longest and it is the session you least want to repeat.

1. PowerA screen that wakes every few minutes to be checked draws more than the same session with the phone dark in a pocket. Charge fully the night before, start the run, then pocket the phone and leave it alone, and on the longest sessions of the block carry a small battery pack in the same pocket and test that arrangement on your second longest run, not on the longest one.
2. SoundSet the volume before you start, because you will not adjust it usefully late in a long run with cold hands, and wind and traffic eat a phone speaker in a pocket, so on a long road run the cue has to reach your ear directly. One open earbud or a bone conduction band does that and still leaves you the traffic, which a sealed pair does not. Decide that once and buy for it, instead of solving it again every weekend.

How weekly volume is usually stepped up, and who says so

In the table, not in a formula. Published plans step volume up gradually and step it back before the race. In Novice 1 the weekend long run climbs from 4 miles in week 1 to 10 miles in week 11, and race week drops to a 4 mile run, a 3 mile run or a cross training session, a 2 mile run and three rest days before the race itself (Hal Higdon, Novice 1 Half Marathon). The convention people quote for the weeks in between is the 10% rule. Marathon Handbook states it as never increasing your mileage by more than 10% per week, and gives the example of 20 miles becoming 22 the following week and 24.5 the week after (Marathon Handbook, The 10 Percent Rule, fetched 2 August 2026).

Treat that as a convention. It is not a physiological law.

The same page says plainly that the rule is not based on scientific data and is not appropriate for all runners, and that it ignores adaptation cycles and cutback weeks (Marathon Handbook, The 10 Percent Rule).

What a calculated plan does and does not do

A calculation, not a coach. Some apps generate the week for you instead of asking you to copy a table, and in Runflake the weekly plan is a calculation from the goal you set, not an adaptive model that rewrites itself around missed runs. That distinction tells you where your judgement is still required. A calculation removes the weekly arithmetic and keeps a target visible.

It does not know you had a fever on Tuesday, or that your calf tightened on the long run.

• One session missed: run the rest of the week as written and let it go. Do not stack it onto another day.
• A whole week missed: repeat the last week you actually completed instead of resuming at the row the calendar points to.
• Two weeks or more: step back further than feels necessary. Rebuild the long run first, since that is what the race tests.
• Missed because something hurt: the plan is not the thing to consult. No figure generated from a goal can assess an injury.

Race day with a phone

Change nothing on the morning. Race day is an ordinary session with a different start line, and the phone setup should be the one you already rehearsed.

1. Start recording as you cross the start line, not when the gun goes off for the front of the field. In a large event those are minutes apart.
2. Expect your recorded distance and the course markers to disagree, and decide in advance which one you are racing. If you want a time, the markers and the official clock are the record.
3. Use the first spoken split as a brake. The opening kilometre is the one that goes out too fast in a crowd, and it is the cheapest one to correct.
4. Keep the phone where it lives on your long runs. A race is a poor place to try a new belt or a pocket you have never loaded.

None of this is a compromise position. The plan is the same plan, the sessions are the same sessions, and the numbers arrive in your ears at every kilometre or mile. A watch saves you a glance.

The rest of the training block does not know the difference.