Cramp-Proofing Your Legs for the Marathon

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Runners Connect podcast. I hope you are having a fantastic day and excited for the weekend.

Today’s question is from Asim.

Asim: In the past three races I haven’t hit the proverbial wall, but I have encountered the terrible muscle cramps at each race.

During the most recent race which was a marathon, I had started experiencing cramping around mile 11.

Coming off plantar fasciitis injury, I knew I was going to struggle as I didn’t have a strong finish to my training session, but I also did not expect to blow up as hard as I did.

What can I do to make my legs bulletproof from these cramps? More mileage, more hills, trail running, strength training?

Jeff: Thank you so much for the question, as this is a very common and happens to a lot of runners. They experience cramps during the race and they just can’t figure out what the cause is.

The cause is that your muscles are not able to handle the load that is required to run the full marathon distance at the pace that you are trying to run it at.

One reason for this could be that you just don’t have the training volume behind you, that is going to allow your muscles to run the full marathon distance at your goal pace.

Knowing that you didn’t have the training volume behind you, you’re probably should have adjusted your goal and slowed your goal pace down significantly, so that you could have through the entire race.

The marathon, we always like to say as coaches that there’s no hiding any flaws in your training. If you had something in your training plan that did not go according to plan, you missed a week or two or just didn’t have a great build up, then the marathon is going to bring that out.

Some of the shorter distances 5K, 10K, half marathon, the race is short enough where you can hide or get away with not having a fantastic training block, but in the marathon, you need to be very wary of how your body is going to respond to missing training.

You really should just slow down your pace so that way you could have gotten through the whole race without suffering these cramps.

The reason with the cramping is that; let’s say that you did have a perfect build up and your training was good heading into the race, the reason that it’s actually happening is during training, it’s very difficult to simulate the exact stresses that are going to occur during the marathon.

For example, you probably have not in training run 20 to 22 at goal marathon pace. That’s not recommended because it’s difficult to recover from, and impacts your ability to get in the mileage, the long runs, and the workouts throughout the rest of the week, if you do something that’s that difficult.

As a result, it’s very difficult to train your muscles to sustain the effort that we’re trying to ask of it, later in the race.

Your form starts to break down. Usually this happens for a couple reasons. For example, your core might not be strong enough to stay in that upright strong position for 22,24,26 miles.

What happens is your core starts to break down and your posture starts to deteriorate maybe you start to hunch forward.

When you start to lean forward or hunch forward, you’re not able to produce the same amount of hip extension or generate the same amount of power from your hips and glutes which is where you normally do.

As a result, your calf must do more work to keep yourself running at that same marathon pace. Your calf, as a result, is not used to doing so much work. You’ve never asked it to do that much work in training. you never trained it to do that much work and therefore it cramps.

This can happen in the hamstrings and quads for different biomechanical reasons, but basically your muscles are being stressed in a way that you never stressed them before, so they cramp.

Solution one is you need to add strength training to your training plan because you need to train those muscles to be able to withstand that training load.

Increasing your mileage, long runs, and workout volume is going to help, but in some runners, we’re limited by that.

If you’re already at your maximum miles a week that you can either handle or fit in timewise then that’s not really a solution to become a better marathoner or to reduce those cramps.

I’d recommend you do specific strength training exercises that are going to make sure that your form does not deteriorate and that we’re stressing the right muscles that we’re using later in the race.

I do recommend you to is Google “Runners Connect marathon cramps” and I did a whole video on the cause of this and then gave you some exercises.

If you are also a Runners Connect insider, if you are not sure, if you are, or if you want to be, just go to runnersconnect.net and either sign in if you’re already a member or register as an insider.

When you register as an insider, we have a bunch of free courses. Once are inside the insider member page, just go to courses and then there are four courses in there. The one we’re talking about is the improved running form course.

It’s completely free and it’s three or four parts. All you do is watch the videos and in those videos, I will demonstrate and give you an exact routine to help prevent that marathon cramping.

I recommend checking that out if you want to get a little bit more involved just beyond googling the articles we have in our block.

I hope that helped answer your question and gave you the answers to your question about why it happened, but the resources for anyone who’s suffering from marathon cramping to be able to find the solutions and create a solution to that problem that you’re having.

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