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Marathon Training
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TEN WEEKS TO GO
TEN WEEKS TO RACE DAY
You have ten weeks to go until race day if your target marathon is run the last weekend in October. You are in the endurance phase of your training. Before you began the eighteen-week program, you built your mileage base to 20–25 miles per week. Your eighteen-week program includes strength, endurance, and sharpening phases. At this point you are gradually increasing your weekly mileage, and are averaging 30–35 miles per week, perhaps more if you are an experienced marathoner.
This week you have two “quality” workouts in your schedule: a long run of twenty miles, and a session at the track doing what the big kids do—mile “repeats.” In last week’s training suggestions we reviewed terms:
Quality—Long runs, hill repeats, and fast-paced runs are called “quality” to distinguish them from comfortable training runs.
Repeat—A pattern of running reproduced after an interval of rest.
This week you have a mid-week track workout and a weekend long run, two quality workouts of which one involves repeats.
LAST WEEK
Last week, you ran a workout called “in-outs,” the purpose of which was to make running at your training pace feel like resting. The total distance covered at training pace was 2-½ miles, an increase from the previous week’s 2 miles.
Before you started your workout, you did a few “strides,” 100 meters run fast enough to make yourself breathe hard and eventually break a sweat. Every workout at the track should begin with a few strides to get your moving parts warmed up and lubricated before you put them through the stress of a workout.
You run these workouts at a pace one minute per mile faster than your predicted marathon pace. So if you plan on a four-hour marathon, your race pace will be close to 9:00/mile. One minute faster is 8:00/mile, or 2:00/lap on the track. The idea is to run your workout at an even pace, the last lap just as fast as the first. This is the way to achieving your goal for the marathon.
THIS WEEK
Here we go with mile repeats, the workout requiring, in my opinion, concentration and determination. You are going to do three of them, for a total distance of three miles at training pace. The purpose of this workout is to get the body used to maintaining pace when it’s tired. As with every visit to the track, start your workout by running a few strides. We learned the physiological purpose of strides last week—getting your heart’s stroke rate and stroke volume elevated so it will be capable of responding quickly to move more blood when you start the planned components of the workout. Larger volumes of blood carry larger volumes of oxygen, the fuel for muscles in aerobic exercise.
Once more we apply the first principle of training: progressive stress. By running mile repeats you are also applying the third principle of training: specificity. This workout is specifically designed to help you perform better in the marathon. It’s not of much use in making you faster at five kilometers.
- Run four laps around the track at two minutes per lap.
- Recover for one lap, but don’t take over four minutes to get back to the starting line.
- Repeat twice more.
The idea is simple. Pushing through lap four on the second mile, and laps three and four on the third mile is less simple. But the workout is over quickly, is very rewarding, and contributes substantially to building endurance.
The second quality workout of the week is a twenty-miler on the weekend. The purpose of this run is simply to cover the distance. Run at an average pace from 1:30 to 2:00 minutes/mile slower than your target marathon race pace. Using again the example of the four-hour marathon, the target race pace is just over 9:00/mile. Spend between 3:30 and 3:40 covering the distance, including water stops and walking breaks. This probably sounds slow to you. Try to keep in mind that the long run is not the race. This is about building yourself up, not tearing yourself down. You will not race faster by running your long runs faster.
NEXT WEEK
Next week, we’ll run another ladder, introducing the concept of the “interval.”
Archive of Marathon Training
TWELVE WEEKS TO GO
ELEVEN WEEKS TO GO
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