Recommended Marathon Workouts

At it’s core, training is all about the principle of adaptation. Your body adapts to the demands you place on it by growing stronger and becoming more efficient. To train specifically for the marathon marathon, your goal should be to develop your aerobic threshold, improve your ability to burn fat as a fuel source when running at marathon pace, and increase your muscular endurance. The more you can develop and target these systems, the faster you will be able to race. These recommended workouts are designed to address these challenges. It is 8 weeks of marathon race specific workouts you can add to your training plan based on the RunnersConnect philosophy. Go directly to recommended workouts.

Step 1: Your Fitness Level

Use this calculator to help us assign you specific paces for your workouts. Find your most recent race result that you feel reflects your fitness level. This could be your PR or it could be a recent race after coming back from time off, etc. In the distance dropdown, choose the distance of this recent race. In the time section,enter your race time as h:mm:ss. If you completed the race in under an hour, make sure to include a 0 for the hour. For example, a marathon time might look like: 4:25:15 while a 10k time might look like: 0:55:10.

Step 2: Recommended workouts

Now that we know your specific times for our workouts, we will get into the details of how many repeats, what distance, the rest, etc. The plans will reference a specific pace from the chart above. For example, 3 miles at Tempo Run Pace. You’d then replace “Tempo Run Pace” with the actual pace assigned to you in the chart above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which days should I do my workouts?

On the days you normally perform your workouts. Long runs are typically Saturday or Sunday. You should have at least 1 easy mileage or off day between workouts (unless it’s a steady/long run combination). The goal of these recommended workouts is not to provide you with a full training plan, but allow you to apply race specific and physiologically optimal workouts to your training plan. We designed it to help all the runners who emailed us looking for specific workouts or help, but did not want a full training plan. Many runners prefer writing their own plans and just are looking for helpful workouts or a way to spice up their existing plan. If you did want a full, custom training plan we have that available for a low price here. These recommended workouts are a great way for you to build specific workouts into a plan you know works for you.

What do I do the rest of the week?

This is where training gets very individual. However, you should be filling the rest of your weekly schedule with easy running mileage, injury prevention or strength work, cross training if you like, and a longer run if there isn’t one already specified for that week.

What if I only have one workout assigned for a week?

If you are a beginner, I would fill the remaining running days of your week with one longer run and the rest easy mileage. Easy runs will help fully develop your aerobic system and, while they don’t seem as challenging as hard workouts, are the path to long-term success. If you are a more experienced runner, then you can add a second tempo/endurance workout to your week. You would then fill out the rest of the week with easy mileage and a long run

Can I download my plan?

Unfortunately, in order to provide you with a specific pace assignment for each run and workout we don’t have a downloadable version.

How do I get a more customized plan?

We do offer custom training plans We take data from your previous training data, current PRs, best training days and develop a personalized training schedule that is uniquely suited for your work/life schedule, strengths and weaknesses to ensure you get the most of your running. Your schedule includes specific runs for every day of the week. Each day has exact mileage, warm-ups, paces, and strength work.