Continued from How to run a marathon (parts 0 to 10)
If you have been following my beginners' guide to running a marathon, you will have progressed from relative physical inactivity to becoming a fully fledged runner. You may well have acquired a life-long addiction, with running becoming an integral part of your life. If this is the case, it's an incredibly good thing for you. You will have already shed quite a bit of any excess weight you may have had. You are being more careful about living a healthy life, not just for health reasons, but because it helps you with your running. If you used to smoke, you will probably have given up by now. You feel good about yourself, and you're focussed on an important target - running a half marathon, and eventually a marathon.
Focus. It's the key word that keeps you motivated. You have to have a well established target, plus intermediate targets. By now, you will have settled into a general training pattern that, health and lack of injuries permitting, you could maintain indefinitely: three to five 10k's during the working week, including one or two speed sessions, plus a long run in the weekend. The variation, depending on what you happen to be targeting in your training, will occur mostly in the weekend long run.
We have set ourselves the ultimate target that is the marathon. But there are also other, intermediate targets. One of them is the half marathon. Before that, it would be a good idea to acquire experience doing road races of shorter distances, which may include 5k, 10k, 16k or other distances. These are excellent occasions to test your form, compare your performance from one occasion to the other, compete with rivals of more or less your own ability, and generally enjoy taking part in a running event with hundreds of like-minded participants. I'll consider these road running events in more detail in one of my next articles in this series.
To build up to a marathon, all you need to do is increase the length of your long run, bit by bit, until you reach a point that is close to the entire distance itself. During the last two to three weeks you then ease off the long distances, allowing your body enough time to recover its strength so that you'll be in optimal shape on the big day itself.
The build-up is fairly straightforward. On three successive weekends you run for 1h30; the next three successive weekends you do 1h45; followed by three successive weekends at 2h00. This goes on at the same rate of increase up to 3h00, again for three successive weekends. Finally, three to four weeks before the marathon itself, you carry out one or two runs of 3h15m, which will be equivalent to around 33-38k, i.e. almost there. The last two weeks you take it easy, as explained earlier.
Now, of course, a programme of 23 successive weekends of long runs is nearly impossible to maintain. You could get the flu (more on this in one of the next articles), you might go on vacation, and be unable to run, you might need to organise a wedding... and you will need a couple of breaks, to sort of recharge your batteries. Successive weekends doing, say, 2h45 - 2h45 - 2h45 - 3h00 - 3h00 - 3h00 - 3h15 - 3h15 would be just a bit too much to sustain. You should therefore allow for a few single interruptions in this build-up, for when you have the flu, your daughter is getting married, etc. However, if you're lucky, you'll still be able to run all weekends, and this is where you can fit in the shorter road races that are so much fun.
So, depending on how much time you have left before the marathon, the ideal thing would be to add a fourth weekend into each of the three-week phases mentioned above, so that your build-up would be something like this:
1h30 - 1h30 - 1h30 - something else - 1h45 - 1h45 - 1h45 - something else - 2h00 - 2h00 - 2h00 - something else - and so on. This is an idealised situation, and the "something else" will never occur exactly every four weeks. What you could do instead is work by months. Let's take the Malta marathon, which takes place end of February / beginning of March. The entire build-up will take 8 months. In July, your long runs will be of 1h30. In August you do 1h45. And so on. In each month, you can afford to have one weekend, whenever this is needed, for 'something else'. If you're lucky, this 'something else' will be a short road race. If something crops up that prevents you from running, you will have to give up that month's short road race - your main aim is the marathon, not the short road race.
With a shorter build-up, say starting on September (avoiding the torrid summer months), you can replace one of the three long runs with 'something else', so that certain stages in the build-up will only consist of two long runs, instead of three. This is a worse option, first of all because you end up getting less endurance training, with consequent effect on race day, and secondly because you will be at greater pressure to fit in all the training necessary, and you won't have much 'allowance' for any unforeseen stoppages.
So, my advice is to allow 8 months from when you're doing a 90-minute long run to marathon day, add 15 minutes to your long runs each month, include one weekend without a long run in each month, and you should be able to be in ideal shape come marathon day. A calendar would obviously help you map out this build-up by including those races you wish to fit in.
Weeks 14 and 15 of our beginner's guide to running a marathon are a repeat of Week 13, except for the speed sessions, which alternate between tempo runs and interval training:
Week 14 (Monday to Sunday): rest - 10k easy - 10k tempo - rest - 10k easy - rest - 1h30 easy
Week 15 (Monday to Sunday): rest - 10k easy - 10k intervals - rest - 10k easy - rest - 1h30 easy
Enjoy your running!
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