On last week’s episode of the Run to the Top, I talked about the 3 critical weeks of recovery after your marathon.
Today, let’s explore some of your options for your training once you are recovered but aren’t quite ready to train for your next marathon.
The first step is to think about your goals, your strengths, your weaknesses, and your lifestyle.
If you just ran a big fall marathon, you might have your eye on your next marathon in the spring. And of course, you’ll want to get better at it, right?
Preparing now, before you get into a true marathon cycle can help you start your new training phase at a better level of fitness.
Or maybe you’re ready to switch things up a bit, trying out new distances and new challenges. This can be a fun way to stay motivated and can even help sharpen up your speed and stamina.
Another common experience is that you are honestly questioning if marathon after marathon is really for you.
If you had a hard training build up, whether that was due to physical, mental, or lifestyle issues, you might be looking forward to not having anything on the calendar for a while.
Whatever you decide, I’ll go over the best way to use this “in between time” to maximize whatever your goal is.
The training in between marathon cycles is often seen as not quite as important as the serious business of marathon training. While yes, you can be a lot more flexible with your running, you don’t want to get too far away from your hard-earned fitness either.
After fall marathons, many runners simply want to take a break from scheduled training, especially with less light in the days, colder temperatures, and all the activities around the holidays. This is completely natural, but if you begin to neglect your speed and strength, the effects of detraining will slowly start to creep up.
As fall turns to winter, the weeks go by, and by the time you decide it’s time to begin your marathon training again, your fitness has regressed. You might even be right back where you started at the beginning of your last training cycle. And that means that it’s a lot less likely that you are going to improve on your race time in the spring.
This detraining period is a big reason for fitness plateaus in the marathon. It’s not because you are getting older or slower. It’s because you aren’t maximizing your down cycles.
Now when I say maximize, I’m not talking about training as hard as you would for a marathon. You definitely do need a break from the long, long miles. What I’m talking about is shifting your training to focus on speed, strength, endurance or another area where you can improve.**{3:44}
Let’s tackle those one by one.
Speed is something pretty much all runners would like to have more of. We want to be able to run a given distance faster than before and we want to have those faster paces feel easier.
Of course, you should be working on your speed within a marathon buildup, but with all the miles and the long runs, there’s typically not enough freshness in your legs to really perform your best in your highest gear.
If you are one of those runners that just loves the zen of the long, long runs and feels that your weakness is speed, now is the perfect time to flip that approach around. A great way to do this is to start training for the 5k.
Most towns in the States have a Turkey Trot at Thanksgiving and even the coldest states seem to have at least a few races over the winter so there should be something to put on your calendar as a goal. If not, you can still train like a 5k runner without an in-person race on the books.
The reason the 5k is amazing is because while it should be much faster than your marathon pace, it’s still highly aerobic which is exactly what you need for the marathon.
So how do you train for the 5k? Well that would need its own episode, which I will do in the future. But the quick and dirty is that you break up the 3.1 mile race into small chunks and practice race pace each week for 6-8 weeks.
But what is race pace?
If you’ve never raced the 5k or if you haven’t in a while, you can use your recent marathon result to get an estimate of your approximate 5k pace. At RunnersConnect, we have a free race conversion calculator that can help you figure it out. We’ll have a link in the show notes or you can head to runnersconnect.net/487 to grab it right now.
So if your goal 5k pace is 8:30 per mile, for example, you would head to the track or a flat road, and start by running 8:30 pace for 400m or a quarter mile. Twelve times a quarter mile is three miles and that’s almost the distance of your race. In between those quarters, you would jog for a minute or perhaps 100m on the track.
Then each consecutive week, you’d stretch out your speed intervals until you can run the entire 3.1 miles at your goal pace.
The trick to 5k workouts is two-fold. You want to keep the recoveries at a jog so to keep the run continuous and you want to make sure you don’t run the speed reps too fast. Your goal is not to run as fast as possible. Your goal is to stretch out your speed for a longer distance. So that means controlling your pace from the very first rep.
Again, there’s more to 5k training than just this kind of workout. But sharpening up your 5k pace will definitely help you enter your marathon block with a higher level of speed than where you started.
Besides working on your speed there are several other ways to boost your fitness level in the off-season while still maintaining a healthy balance with the rest of your life. I’ll go over those in just a minute.
The next place to focus during the break between marathon cycles is strength. When you are in the thick of marathon training, you really don’t want to be lifting weights more than 2-3 times a week. Sure, some people break up their strength work into shorter, more frequent sessions, but overall, there’s not a whole lot of room in a marathon build up to really get strong without it affecting your runs.
So what does a strength phase look like? This could be 4 to 8 weeks of a gradually escalating strength program. If you lifted 2-3 times a week during marathon training, you could add a day or two.
You’ll also want to focus on lifting heavier. Lifting heavy builds muscle in a shorter session than lifting lighter weights, so you don’t have to spend hours in the gym. You should be running less at this point, so you are simply exchanging some of your run time for strength time.
You can also build strength into your runs and a great way to do that is hill training. Hill repeats are great for building strong legs and they can be done a couple times a month in your strength phase as your workout day.
This is also a nice time to add in some plyometrics. Plyos or jumping workouts can be too intense during marathon cycles, but are perfect now. Plyos build leg strength, power, and help improve your balance, all key components of strong marathoners.
The third area to focus on is endurance. Now, this one might seem a little strange since marathon training itself is mainly focused on endurance. But for those of you who are new to the marathon or really struggled during the second half of the race, your endurance could probably use some work. It’s also something to work on if you seem to be much better at the shorter distances, but just can’t quite translate that to longer races.
Endurance is built over time with lots of aerobic running. And it’s not only made with long, long runs. It can get better every day of the week. So take a look at how much you are running during the week. Could you add a mile to your easy runs? Could you add another day of easy running? Or could you add a day of easy aerobic cross training like biking, swimming, or walking? All of these options are great for boosting your aerobic engine, but don’t do them all at once. Add one variable at a time for a few weeks, reassess how you are doing, and then determine if you can handle more or not.
Last week I talked about debriefing from your race, and now is the time to take another look at what you wrote.
Take some time to identify what you did really well and where things can be improved. The off season is the ideal time to work on both.
Let’s say that you had a good race, but you made the common mistake of going out too fast in the early miles. The end of a marathon will always be tough, but it will be exponentially harder if you burned up too much speed in the first 5-10k. So how can you improve upon this for next time, especially if you are trying to run faster overall?
The first question to ask yourself is why did you go out too fast in the first place? Were you unaware of your pace? Were you trying to go by effort and thought you were going slower than you really were? Or were you just sorta winging it?
The good news is that no matter what the explanation is for a too-fast start, learning not to do this is a skill that can be learned. One of my favorite workouts to practice this is the cutdown or progressive tempo.
After an easy mile or two as a warm up, begin to run progressively faster by about ten seconds per mile. Where you start and where you end up will depend on your fitness and mileage, but the key is to start off easy and end up fast. For example, you might start off 20 seconds slower than your marathon pace and speed up to your half marathon or even 10k pace after a few miles. The exact pacing is not the goal. The goal is to start slow and end fast and the best way to do that is to really take it easy at the beginning, just like you need to in a marathon.
Your cutdown might be 3 miles or it might be 10 miles and it should feel good at the beginning and pretty darn hard at the end. It teaches you not only how to run hard when you are tired, but it forces you to really be in touch with a big range of paces.
After all, speed is only useful if you can control it.
And finally, the down time between marathon cycles can be used to focus holistically on who you are as a well-rounded athlete and person. After all, marathon training requires you to be highly dedicated and focused, sometimes at the expense of other things in your life.
When I asked my followers on Instagram what they liked to do during this time, most of them responded with a combination of everything I just mentioned.
With fewer miles to run, we can focus on both speed and strength. We can reconnect with our running buddies for some fun miles instead of worrying about what’s on our schedule for the day. We can finally focus on mobility work or yoga. We can sign up for fun races with the kids.
By the time the new marathon cycle starts, we will be stronger, faster, more mobile, and maybe even a little happier than we were before.
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