Why pause exists

Real training rarely runs uninterrupted from start to race day. Work travel, a head cold, a family event, or just a stretch where running falls off the priority list. Every plan deserves a clean way to hit pause without losing the work behind it. Pausing freezes the plan in place; resuming brings it back exactly as it was.

Plan statuses

Every Pheidi plan lives in one of four states:

  • Active: your current plan. Workouts are visible on the calendar and reminder emails fire.
  • Paused: frozen. Nothing schedules, no emails are sent, but every week, workout, vacation, and edit is preserved.
  • Completed: you finished the plan after race day.
  • Archived: retired. Kept in your account history but no longer in the switchable list.

Pausing your active plan

Pausing flips the active plan to Paused. The plan stays in place, all your weeks, logged workouts, vacations, injury history, and any edits you've made are preserved exactly. The morning reminder email stops; phase-transition emails stop too. Nothing is deleted.

Resuming a paused plan

The full-screen Your plan is paused prompt belongs to a runner with nothing else running: pause your only plan and that is what the plan tab shows, with Resume and Archive on it. If a plan is still active — after generating a new one, say — you keep seeing that plan, and the paused one waits in the plan switcher instead.

Resuming flips the plan back to Active. Pheidi only ever has one active plan, so the path you take to come back changes what happens to any plan that's currently active:

  • Resume endpoint: if you hit the dedicated resume action on a paused plan, any currently-active plan is archived (removed from the switcher) before this one is activated.
  • Plan switcher: if you use the in-app switcher to pick a paused plan, the currently-active plan is paused instead of archived, so it stays in the switcher and you can flip back to it later.

Workouts that fell in the past while the plan was paused stay where they were scheduled. If you want the plan to shift forward to cover the time you missed, regenerate from your current week or block off the missed days as a vacation (see Vacation Scheduling).

Auto-pause when generating a new plan

If you generate a brand-new training plan while an existing plan is still active, Pheidi automatically pauses the old one rather than deleting it. That way you can switch back to a previous plan if the new one doesn't pan out, or finish a plan after a long break without re-entering all your data.

Auto-pause after a long silence (off by default)

A plan nobody comes back to keeps scheduling runs forever, and keeps mailing about them. Pheidi has a background check built for that: an active plan that was created more than 30 days ago and still shows no sign that you are around gets paused instead of left running. The check is off by default — while it is off it still runs and counts who it would pause, but pauses nobody, so switching it on is a deliberate decision rather than something that happens on a deploy.

Four things each count as being here, and any one of them keeps your plan active:

  • You opened the app. Reading your plan counts even if you logged nothing — plenty of runners keep their log on paper.
  • You logged an outcome. A completion or a skip, on any of your plans, not just this one.
  • You told us you were away. Days blocked off as vacation inside the window mean the silence was expected.
  • You are new. Signed up inside the window and still getting started, or generated this plan inside it.

Thirty days is the default, and it is thirty rather than fourteen deliberately: a fortnight is a holiday, a hard block logged on paper, or an injury you mean to come back from, and pausing those would be wrong. Nothing about it is destructive — an auto-paused plan is paused in exactly the sense described above, every week and workout preserved, and coming back puts you on the same Your plan is paused prompt with Resume on it.

Switching between plans

Active and paused plans appear in the plan switcher in your account. Switching to a paused plan flips it to active and pauses (not archives) whatever was running before, so both plans stay switchable. Archived plans do not appear in the switcher list.

What pause does not do

  • It doesn't delete any data. Every week, workout, edit, and log is kept.
  • It doesn't shift the race date or recalculate the plan.
  • It doesn't cancel your account or sign you out.
  • It doesn't stop transactional emails like sign-in codes.

Pause and resume live inside the Pheidi app, sign in to use them.

See also