How to Keep Your Speed During Marathon Training

While the fall racing season may seem like a lifetime away, especially when you haven’t had a chance to fully  enjoy your summer vacation yet, if you managed to nab a spot at your fall marathon of choice, the time to begin laying the foundation for marathon training is only a few weeks away. Building a base and improving your aerobic system is critical if you want to run your fastest possible marathon this fall.

But what about all those fun and competitive 5ks you have lined up this summer and early fall, when the weather finally breaks? While you’re willing to sacrifice a few seconds off your 5k PR for a great marathon finish, you don’t want to completely tank all of your summer races. So, how do you keep your speed for the summer races while developing your base and ramping up the miles?

The solution is disguising your speed work.

In this article, we’ll explain why keeping up your speed is important and provide three easy training methods to run well at your shorter summer races while focusing on the marathon.

Beyond racing well, why is keeping your speed important during marathon training?

Experienced marathoners know the key components to race day success are a high aerobic threshold (the fastest pace you can run while still staying aerobic, which closely correlates to marathon pace) and the ability to burn fat as a fuel source. The most effective way to improve these elements is a steady diet of aerobic mileage and threshold work.

Unfortunately, these two types of training don’t directly improve your speed. That means a you can go months neglecting an important energy system during marathon base training.

Neglecting any energy system for a long time period is detrimental to your overall fitness. In particular, ignoring speed work during the marathon base building period reduces running efficiency. Speed work increases leg muscle strength and power, which improves economy (how much energy it takes to run at a certain speed). When muscles become stronger, fewer muscle fibers need to contract to hit a particular pace. Thus the energy expenditure is lower, which can make running at marathon pace feel easier.

Tricks to keep your speed while ramping up your miles

Speed and mileage are two diametrically opposed training elements. Many runners don’t know they safely can improve both with a few innovative workouts. Implementing one or more of these workouts in your marathon build-up will allow you to maintain your speed this fall.

Short, explosive hill sprints

Hill running is the most specific form of strength training a runner can do and, because of the mechanics, hill sprints are safer than lifting or speed work on flat ground. For example, running up a hill shortens the distance the foot has to fall before hitting the ground, decreasing the shock on the body.

Short hill sprints, popularized by Brad Hudson, stress the muscles as well as the connective tissues (tendons and ligaments) without fatigue. Running up a hill provides increased resistance for the hips, glutes, and quads, which increases specific running strength and improves speed.

How to incorporate

During your marathon base phase, you should include hill sprints once or twice per week after or as part of your easy run. Because hill sprints may be a new element to your training, start with only two or three sprints at a time. Slowly add one or two repetitions per week until you hit 10-12.

Ideally, you should start the hill sprints with about a mile or half mile to go in your run. Then you can complete the majority of the distance, but still have a small recovery jog to loosen up after sprinting hard. However, we don’t all have a hill within a mile of our finishing spot. So, if the hill sprints have to come in the middle or the end of your run that is fine.

Choose a hill with a 7-10% grade. Stand at the bottom and, from a standing start, sprint up it as fast as you can. Land on the balls of your feet and pump your arms. The sprint is designed to be a maximum effort, so don’t go over fifteen seconds. Walk slowly and gently back down the hill, rest until you are completely recovered, and begin the next repeat.

Starting with just two or three repeats and taking a full recovery will gradually introduce your body to this new stimulus. This will keep you healthy and prevent sabotaging the base building stage’s benefits by doing anaerobic work too early.

Strides and sprint work

Strides are another tactic runners can use to incorporate speed work without adding fatigue. Strides allow a runner to aim for short fast bursts without interrupting the physiological benefits of the base-building phase.

One of the main physiological benefits to doing strides is improving your running form. Strides allow you to focus for 20-30 seconds at a time on specific form changes rather than concentrating during an entire run. The neuromuscular facilitation and concentration can lead to improvements in overall fitness and personal bests at every distance, not just the marathon, and the risk for injury is negligible.

How to incorporate

You should include strides after your easy run days, up to four times per week. If you’re doing workouts in your base phase, you should include strides on the day before your workout. This will not only help you work on your speed, but help stimulate your legs for the faster running to come the next day. It also helps prevent injuries.

Strides are completed after your run, not during. They should begin with a light post-run stretch to loosen anything that was tight on the run or that is a consistent problem area. Like hill sprints, strides also require a full recovery between each repeat. The purpose of doing strides is not getting in a hard workout or having you breathing hard, but working on mechanics and improving speed. Here’s how you should approach strides:

1. Begin your stride by easing into a fast pace over the first five seconds. It is important to ease into the pace, and not explode out of the gate, to prevent injury.
2. After five seconds, you should reach full speed. Begin focusing on staying relaxed and letting your body do the work. Continue to stay relaxed at your top-end speed and gradually, over the last five seconds, slow yourself to a stop.
3. Take a full recovery between each stride, which should be about two minutes. You can stop to catch your breath, walk, or slowly jog in place.

Planned surges during a long run

The long run is the cornerstone of any marathon build-up. It is a critical training element if you want to run well in the fall. However, the long run has the potential to be more than just time on your feet with long, slow miles. Implementing planned surges during a long run can inject a quick dose of speed into what would otherwise be a slow running day, without compromising the aerobic benefits.

Just like strides and hill sprints, including surges during your long runs may not seem like a whole lot of speed. However, add them up and they provide a powerful dose of speed work without compromising the long run’s integrity.

Long run surges not only help improve a runner’s top end speed, but enhance your ability to run fast when tired while developing the specific physiological adaptations and mental skills necessary to increase your effort and pace as the race gets more difficult. Furthermore, because surges are completed in a glycogen-depleted state, they continually develop your body’s ability to use fat as a fuel source early in the base building period.

How to incorporate

Long run surges should begin about half way through the intended long run distance. The length of the surge itself and the rest in between each surge are two variables you can adjust to make the workout harder or easier.

The most basic long run surge workout includes 60-second to 2-minute pickups that are run at 3k to 5k pace starting 50-60 percent through the long run and include a full five to six minutes of easy running between each. An example workout for a 3-hour marathoner might look something like this: 16 mile long w/7 x 90 sec surges @ 6:05 pace w/5 min easy between, starting at mile 10.

Once you’ve become accustomed to the surges or if you’re training at a very high level, you can progress to 6-8 x 2-minute surges with five minutes easy between each.
By keeping the easy recovery period at five minutes or longer, you won’t accumulate fatigue. You should be able to include this type of workout every other long run.

Putting it together in a training plan

Now that you’ve seen three highly effective elements you can add to maintain speed without compromising your marathon training, how does it all come together within a training plan?

Here’s a very simple marathon base training week that includes the aforementioned workouts. This sample is designed for someone who runs 6 days per week, but you can modify it to fit your own fitness level:

Monday Easy run with strides
Tuesday Steady effort with explosive hill sprints
Wednesday Easy run with strides
Thursday Tempo run
Friday Off day
Saturday Easy run with explosive hill sprints
Sunday Long run with surges

This schedule doesn’t appear to include much speed work, but when you look closely it adds up. All combined, this schedule can include up to two miles of work at your top end speed (strides and hill sprints) and close to two miles at your 3k or VO2max pace (long run surges).

All of our coaches on staff at RunnersConnect include this type of training in the schedules we design for our runners. If you’re confused about how you can add speed development to your Fall marathon build-up, we’d be happy to help design a schedule that fits your current abilities. If you’re building your own schedule and have questions, shoot us your questions in the comments below and we’ll do our best to help! Good luck at your marathon of choice!

A version of this post originally appeared at competitor.com