18 weeks to your best marathon

The marathon demands respect.

The physiological and psychological demands are extreme; therefore, you must plan your preparation intelligently and thoroughly.

Unfortunately, "intelligent" and "thorough" aren’t the two words that most readily come to mind when thinking about some marathon training programs. Search the Web under "marathon training" and you’ll find thousands of well-meaning but only intermittently helpful sites. The training advice on many of these sites is based more on personal anecdotes and handed-down folk wisdom than exercise science. You’d be hard-pressed to summarize why they’re prescribing the type of preparation they present.

That’s too bad, because while running a marathon isn’t easy, training for it should be relatively simple. Running a marathon requires specific physiological attributes. The task at hand is to run 26.2 miles as fast as possible. The requirements for this feat in terms of fuel use, oxygen consumption, biomechanical requirements, and even psychological attributes are highly predictable.

By understanding the marathon’s physiological demands, such as having a high lactate threshold and the ability to store large amounts of glycogen in your muscles and liver, we can research the types of training that are most effective for improving marathon performance and explain why. Then we can investigate how to structure a training program so that it progresses logically to the desired end point.

In our book, Advanced Marathoning, we explain in detail both the physiological demands of the marathon and the reasoning behind the types of training we advise. Here, we will simply present a training plan that stems from these principles with brief explanations of each type of training.

This particular plan is for mid- to high-mileage marathoners who train 50 to 70 miles per week. The same principles can be used to devise schedules for other mileage ranges, several of which are included in Advanced Marathoning. We recommend an 18-week schedule for most situations. Eighteen weeks allows plenty of time to stimulate the necessary adaptations to improve your marathon performance, while short enough that you can focus your efforts without becoming bored with the process.

It is useful to divide your overall training schedule into phases, called mesocycles. The training schedules consist of four mesocycles, which focus on endurance, lactate threshold and endurance, race preparation, and tapering.

Before Starting the Schedule

This schedule is challenging right from the start and gets harder as your marathon approaches. So that you can progress as the training increases in quantity and quality, and to minimize your chances of injury, you should be able to complete the first week of the schedule without too much effort. A base-training program can get you to this level before beginning the marathon training program.

Be realistic in assessing whether you’re ready for the first week of the schedule. For example, if you’ve been running 30 miles per week and your longest run in the last several weeks is eight miles, now isn’t the time to jump to a 53-mile week containing a 15-mile run, as the first week of this schedule calls for. The idea behind the schedule isn’t to make you as tired as possible as soon as possible but to apply repeated training stresses that you absorb and benefit from.

As a rule, you should be running at least 40 miles a week before starting this schedule, and in the last month you should have comfortably completed a run close in length to the long run called for in the first week of the schedule.

Adjusting the Schedule

The schedule is presented in a day-by-day format. The main limitation with this approach is that it’s impossible to guess the myriad of outside factors that may influence your day-to-day nonrunning life. Work schedules, family life, relationships, school commitments, and Mother Nature all play a part in determining when you get to do your long runs and other aspects of marathon preparation. You’ll no doubt require some flexibility in your training and will need to juggle days around from time to time. That’s expected, and as long as you don’t try to make up for lost time by doing several hard days in a row, you should be able to avoid injury and overtraining. By reading more about the principles of training, you’ll be able to safely fine-tune your schedule to suit your circumstances.

Following the Schedule

Each column of the schedule represents a week’s training, counting down week by week until race day.

We have included the specific workout for each day as well as the category of training for that day. For example, on the Tuesday of the 7-weeks-to-go column, the specific workouts are a 6-mile run and a 4-mile run, and the category of training for that day is recovery. This allows you to quickly see the balance of training during each week and the progression of workouts from week to week. Look again at the schedule—it’s easy to see that with seven weeks to go to the marathon, there are four recovery days that week, along with a lactate threshold session, a long run, and a medium-long run.

Looking at the row for Sunday, you can see how the long runs progress and then taper in the last few weeks.

The workouts are divided into the following eight categories: long runs, medium-long runs, general aerobic, lactate threshold, VO2max, speed, recovery, and marathon-specific runs. We’ll explain each of these categories briefly.

Long Runs

A long run is any run of 17 miles or longer. Obviously, the intention of long runs is to improve your endurance in preparation for the marathon’s 26.2 miles. To gain the most from your long runs, you need to do them at the correct intensity. Long runs shouldn’t be slow jogs during which you just accumulate time on your feet. The most beneficial intensity range for long runs is to gradually increase from a slow early pace as you warm up, reaching 20% slower than your goal marathon race pace at five miles and accelerating to 10% below marathon pace during the last five miles of the run. At this intensity range, a 22-mile long run will take approximately the same amount of time as your marathon.

Medium-Long Runs

A medium-long run is any run of 11 to 16 miles. Medium-long runs reinforce the physiological benefits of your long runs. To gain the greatest physiological benefits, the pace for these runs should be similar to the pace for long runs.

General Aerobic Runs

General aerobic runs include any run of ten miles or less that’s done at a steady pace. Faster runs of this length fall into the lactate threshold category, whereas slower runs are specifically for recovery. In other words, these are your standard, moderate-effort, putting-in-the-miles runs. The intention of your general aerobic runs is to enhance your overall aerobic conditioning through boosting your training volume; these runs improve your marathon readiness because many of the beneficial adaptations that improve endurance are related to the total volume of training.

Lactate Threshold

Lactate threshold runs are tempo runs in which you run for at least 20 minutes at your lactate threshold pace. This coincides closely with your current 15K to half marathon race pace. Tempo runs provide a strong stimulus to improve your lactate threshold pace, which leads to similar improvements in your marathon race pace. The lactate threshold sessions are done after a 2- to 3-mile warm-up. The tempo runs in this schedule are from four to seven miles long. Slower runners should run closer to their 15K race pace on tempo runs, whereas faster runners should run closer to their half marathon race pace.

VO₂ max

VO2 max runs are intervals of 600 meters to 2,000 meters duration, which are run at 95 to 100 percent of your current VO2 max pace. This coincides closely with your current 3K to 5K race pace. These sessions provide a strong stimulus to improve your VO2 max.

Careful readers will notice that none of the VO2 max sessions calls for repeats longer than 1600 meters. The optimal duration for VO2 max intervals is two to six minutes; only elite runners will cover more than 1600 meters in a 6-minute interval. The longer your repeats are in these workouts, the more days you’ll need after the workout for recovery. Though VO2 max work is an important part of your marathon preparation, it’s not as crucial in the marathon as it is in races such as 5K and 10K. The VO2 max sessions in this schedule, then, feature repeats that strike a balance between being long enough to provide a powerful training stimulus and short enough to leave you fresh for your other important workouts of the week.

The same reasoning applies for the prescribed pace in these VO2 max workouts: whereas runners focusing on shorter races need to do some of their intervals closer to 3K race pace, marathoners gain maximum benefit from sticking to 5K race pace.

Speed

Speed runs are repetitions of 50 to 150 meters that improve leg speed and running form. These sessions are done after a thorough warm-up and often toward the end of a general aerobic run or a recovery run. Allow yourself plenty of rest between repetitions so that you can run each one with good technique.

Recovery

Recovery runs are relatively short runs done at a relaxed pace to enhance recovery for your next hard workout. These runs aren’t necessarily jogs, but they should be noticeably slower than your other workouts of the week.

Marathon-Pace Runs

Marathon-pace runs are medium-long or long runs during which you run most of the miles at your goal marathon pace. These runs provide the precise physiological benefit of allowing you to practice the pace and form of race day. They’re also a great confidence booster. Start these runs comfortably, and then run the last portion at marathon race pace. For example, if the schedule calls for 16 miles with 12 miles at marathon race pace, gradually pick up the pace during the first four miles, and then run the last 12 miles at marathon goal pace.

Doing Doubles

Sometimes marathoners benefit from running twice a day. This is obviously the case for elites cranking out 130-mile weeks, but it isn’t necessary on a regular basis if you’re running 50 to 70 miles per week. In this schedule, doubles are called for only on the occasional recovery day, with a total of 10 miles for the day. On these days, your recovery will be enhanced by doing a 6-miler and a 4-miler rather than putting in one 10-mile run. Instead of making you more tired, splitting your mileage like this on easy days will speed your recovery because each run will increase blood flow to your muscles yet take very little out of you.

A Word About "Hard" Days

Looking at this schedule, you might be wondering, "Where are all the ‘speed’ workouts?" After all, it’s normal to think that anyone preparing for a marathon should be training as hard as possible, and what better way to be sure that you’re doing so than by hitting the track at least once a week for lung-searing intervals, right?

Briefly put, we designed the schedule to provide the optimal stimuli to the physiological systems that most determine marathoning success—endurance, lactate threshold and VO2max, in that order. In the long run, it’s the long runs and tempo runs that have the most relevance to your performance on marathon day, not how often you’ve churned out a sterling set of half-mile repeats.

During your long buildup, understanding the components of marathon success can provide confidence that you’re training properly. Understanding marathon physiology not only will help you explain to your training buddies why you won’t be joining them for quarters next week but will also remind you why you’re doing a 15-miler in the middle of the workweek. If your running friends continue to chide you for not training hard enough, invite them to follow the schedules with you for a few weeks, then report back. We suspect they’ll have gotten the message by then.

From Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas. Copyright 2001. Excerpted by permission of Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL.