Advanced Marathoning

Preface

Guidelines for Advanced Marathoning

Welcome to the second edition of Advanced Marathoning. The positive reception to the first edition, and the direct feedback about it that we’re pleased to regularly receive, only strengthens our belief that there are tens of thousands of readers out there eager to know how to conquer one of running’s most challenging races.

The key to simply finishing a marathon isn’t a secret: Train long to go long. But what about when you want to race a marathon? Then things aren’t so simple.

Besides gaining enough baseline endurance to complete the distance, now your concerns turn to matters such as how fast to do your long runs, what types of interval sessions to do, how to manipulate your diet for maximum performance, how to schedule hard workouts to allow both progress and recovery, and so on. The best answers to these questions aren’t so obvious, and they require a solid base of knowledge. You’ll acquire that knowledge through this book.

If you’ve run a marathon and want to move beyond the basics, or if you’re an accomplished runner at shorter distances planning a marathon debut, then it’s time to graduate to Advanced Marathoning. We hope you’ll agree that this second edition, with new chapters and expanded, updated information in every chapter, will become one of the most valuable resources in your running library.

What do we mean by advanced marathoning? Simply this: that many runners aren’t content with saying, “I finished.” They want to run the marathon as they do shorter races – as fast as possible. That doesn’t mean they’re going to drop everything in their lives and do nothing but train, but it does mean they’re committed to doing their best, taking into consideration such factors as their age and real-world commitments. The runners for whom we wrote this book have goals such as setting a personal best, qualifying for Boston, or running faster than they did 10 years ago.

Competing in the marathon, as opposed to completing the distance without regard for time, requires thorough, intelligent preparation. Being dedicated to improving your marathon performance requires knowing such things as how fast to do your long runs given your goal race pace, how far and how fast your hard sessions should be, what to eat so that you’re able to run as fast at mile 25 as at the start, and so on. Advanced marathoning has to be based on more than common sense and running folklore. Advanced Marathoning, therefore, is based on sport science.

The training schedules in the second section of this book are based on a simple concept: Research in exercise physiology has revealed that the fastest marathoners have a few key attributes in common. These include an ability to store a large amount of glycogen (the stored form of carbohydrate) in their muscles, an ability to sustain submaximal speeds for prolonged periods, an ability to send large amounts of oxygen to muscles and have their muscles use that oxygen, and an ability to run faster than others using a given amount of oxygen. We know which of these attributes are most important for successful marathoning, and we know what types of training best improve these attributes. Marathon training, then, should be a matter of balancing these types of training with adequate recovery so that your body’s ability to sustain a relatively fast pace for 26.2 miles (42.2 km) improves as your goal race approaches.

We could, of course, simply present the training schedules found in the latter part of this book and say, “Just do what we tell you. Trust us.” But we think that the more you understand why you’re running a given workout, the more motivated you’ll be to stick with your training and the better prepared you’ll be to assess your progress toward your marathon goal. For that reason, before our training schedules are several chapters that explain the principles of successful marathoning. These chapters explain what is critical for marathon success and why. Digesting the information in them will help you be a better marathoner. Let’s look at the contents of the first part of this book.

Your Guide to Understanding the Marathon

Chapter 1 is the longest chapter in this book. We don’t expect that everyone will sit down and read it all at once; in fact, you could start on the training schedule of your choice right now and not have to worry that you haven’t looked at chapter 1. Eventually, though, you’ll want to read this chapter carefully and understand its key concepts because it explains the science we used in constructing the training schedules.

Chapter 1 gives an in-depth examination of the physiological attributes needed for success in the marathon. These include a high lactate threshold, an ability to store a large amount of glycogen in your muscles and liver, a well-developed ability to use fat as fuel, a well-developed maximal oxygen uptake, and good running economy. (Don’t worry if any of these concepts are unclear to you – you’ll fully understand them and their relation to marathoning after reading chapter 1.) We look at the traits your body must have to run a good marathon, and then we detail how to train to provide the greatest stimulus for these traits to improve.

Understanding the concepts in chapter 1 is critical. Contrary to what some people think, training for a fast marathon doesn’t mean simply running as many miles as possible as quickly as possible. Regardless of how inspired you are to run your best marathon, you most likely have to prepare for it while not neglecting those annoying little details such as your job. Your training, then, should provide the biggest return for the time you put into it. After you read chapter 1, you’ll know why the targeted training the schedules call for is optimal for marathoning success.

Chapter 2 explains the crucial role that proper nutrition and hydration play in successful marathoning. What marathoners should eat and drink is the subject of much ill-informed discussion – perhaps almost as much as training is. After reading chapter 2, you’ll know what marathon training and racing require in terms of fuel and how your diet contributes to meeting your marathon goal. You’ll also understand how dehydration can significantly reduce your performance and the strategies you can use to avoid it in training and on race day.

As we said previously, intelligent marathon preparation means more than accumulating repeated days of hard mileage. You’ll make more progress toward your goal by doing one of the key workouts described in chapter 1, allowing your body to absorb the benefits of that workout, and then doing another targeted session. In other words, you should allow your body to recover after an especially long or hard run. Chapter 3 shows how to maximize your recovery, including how far and how fast to run in the days following a long or hard session, what to eat and drink to refuel most quickly, and how to monitor your body’s signs to stay healthy enough to reap the benefits of your hard work.

If you follow one of the training schedules in this book, your training will contain all the running elements you’ll need for a fast marathon. But there are things you can do in your nonrunning hours that can help your overall improvement as a marathoner. In chapter 4, we detail the types of flexibility, core strength, resistance training, and aerobic cross-training activities that will make you the best marathoner. We also describe a few technique drills that will help improve your running form.

What you do in the last few weeks before your marathon can have a profound effect on your finishing time. Because tapering your training before the marathon is both so important and so misunderstood, we’ve created a new chapter devoted to the topic. In chapter 5, you’ll learn how – and why – to reduce your mileage as the marathon approaches and what workouts to do just before the race to reach the start line with the optimal blend of being rested and ready.

The final background chapter details what to do on race day. Chapter 6 discusses race strategy, with section-by-section pacing advice, and presents information on other crucial matters, such as what to eat on race day and how to drink on the run to minimize dehydration.

The Training Schedules

Chapters 8 through 11 apply the principles detailed in chapters 2 through 6 to day-by-day training schedules leading to your marathon. They’re preceded by chapter 7, another new chapter in this second edition, which gives in-depth direction on how to follow the training schedule of your choice, including how fast to do each of the key types of workouts.

Chapters 8 through 11 are divided on the basis of weekly mileage. (The training schedules in these chapters, as well as in chapter 12, also describe each day’s workout in terms of kilometers. Choose whichever unit of measurement you’re more comfortable with.) Chapter 8 contains the schedules that call for the lowest weekly mileage; these peak at 55 miles, or 88 kilometers, per week. Chapter 9 contains schedules that call for 55 to 70 miles (88 to 113 km) per week. Chapter 10’s schedules range from 70 to 85 miles (113 to 137 km). The final new chapter in this book, chapter 11, is for the real high-mileage folks – it includes weeks of just more than 100 miles, or 161 kilometers.

The weekly mileage you follow is up to you. Making that decision should be based on your running history, your tendency toward injury above a certain level of mileage, what else will be going on in your life in the months before your goal race, and so on. Regardless of which schedule you follow, it will contain the workouts that will lead to the biggest gains in marathon-specific fitness for that level of mileage.

Chapters 8 through 11 present you with another decision to make. Each chapter contains a 12-week and an 18-week schedule. Although we recommend that most readers follow the 18-week schedule, we realize that sometimes you don’t have the luxury of that amount of planning. The 12-week schedules are for these situations, and while they’re more compact than is optimal, they nonetheless contain the workouts needed to make significant progress in such a short time.

The schedules are designed to be easy to read, vertically and horizontally. Horizontally, they show you how your mileage and training emphases change as your marathon approaches. This helps you understand your key training goals for a given period. Looking at the schedules vertically enhances that understanding because you can quickly grasp the key workouts in a given week. The schedules specify the purpose of each day’s workout. That way you can not only determine what you’re trying to achieve on a certain day of the week, but you can also look down through the week to see your most important training goals for that week.

You’ll note that the schedules specify what to do every day of the many weeks leading up to your marathon. We realize, of course, that it’s the rare reader whose life will so perfectly coincide with such a detailed schedule. Again, looking at the schedules vertically and horizontally will prove helpful because you’ll know what types of training are most important for wherever you are on the schedule, so you’ll know which workouts to emphasize if you need to juggle a few days around.

Chapter 12 is a bit different from the other training-schedule chapters, and it’s for marathoners who themselves are a bit different. Chapter 12 is for multiple-marathon runners who want to run two or more marathons within 12 weeks or less. Following such a schedule usually isn’t the way to run your fastest marathon, but it’s not our place to say categorically that you should never attempt such a feat. Chapter 12 acknowledges that some runners want to tackle this challenge, and it provides schedules that will maximize your chances of success in the second (or third or fourth) marathon in a given time period. Using the principles behind the other schedules, chapter 12 provides schedules for your best possible marathon 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 weeks after another marathon.

Now that you know what’s in this book and how to use it, let’s get going on understanding the basics of successful marathoning.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks go to

• our wives, Christine Pfitzinger and Stacey Cramp, for undying support;

• Laurel Plotzke and Kevin Matz at Human Kinetics for bringing this book to fruition;

• Ryan Hall for writing the foreword;

• the world-class marathoners profiled in these pages for sharing how they’ve succeeded; and

• Jack Daniels, the late Arthur Lydiard, Bill Rodgers, David Martin, Bill Squires, Joe Vigil, Lorraine Moller, Kevin Ryan, Arch Jelley, and Randy Wilber for their valuable insights into marathon training.