Asking for the workout you want

You are not limited to the sessions your plan generates. If you know what you want to run, say it in your own words and your coach will build it — reps, recoveries, paces and all.

This is probably the least obvious thing AgentRunCoach can do, so it is worth being concrete.

Say it the way you would say it out loud

All of these work:

• “Make Thursday 6 × 4 minutes at threshold with 2 minutes jog between.”
• “Give me 3 sets of 4 × 400m, 90 seconds between reps, 3 minutes between sets.”
• “Turn Saturday’s long run into a progression — last 3 miles at marathon pace.”
• “I want a descending session: 6, 5, 4 and 3 minutes, getting faster each rep.”
• “20 minutes easy, 20 at half marathon pace, 10 easy.”

How much you need to specify depends on the kind of session.

Easy runs fill themselves in; hard sessions do not

For an easy run or a long run, the distance or the duration is enough. “Make Sunday 14 miles easy” is a complete instruction — there is nothing to invent, and the steady block is genuinely the shape of the session.

A hard session is different, because the shape is the session. Thirty continuous minutes at interval pace is not a shorter version of 6 × 5 minutes; it is a different workout, and a much harder one. So when you ask for quality work, say enough to build it — how many reps, how long, and roughly how much recovery.

If you leave out something essential, your coach will not guess. It tells you what is missing and asks for it, so your next sentence gets you the session. That is deliberate: a guessed workout is one you would actually go out and run.

Changing one part of a session

Once a session exists you can edit a single piece of it without rebuilding the whole thing:

• “Make the recoveries 90 seconds instead of two minutes.”
• “Drop the last rep.”
• “Same session, but on the treadmill at 1% incline.”
• “Move Thursday’s workout to Friday.”

When a session does not fit your plan

Asking for something harder than your plan would have given you does not get refused. Ask for a hard interval workout in the middle of a beginner block and you will get it, along with an honest note about why the plan did not have one there. The decision stays yours — your coach’s job is to make sure you are making it on purpose.

Getting it again next time

A session you like can be saved to your workouts and pulled into a later week rather than described from scratch each time — “save that one” is enough.