Marathon Training for Confidence

Audio Transcript

Sinead: Hi everyone. Coach Sinead here with you to answer your training and racing questions, and help you run smarter and faster.

Today, we have a great question from Delissa.

Delissa: Hi! I’ve ran about 11 half marathons and I’ve been thinking more and more about running a marathon, yet I’m still very nervous about the distance.

My question is will it be okay for me to do the training for a marathon and instead run a half marathon?

I want to see if I’m able to do the training and maybe build my confidence before I’m still able to go out and run the marathon.

Is there any harm in doing marathon training and instead just running a half marathon?

Thank you for answering my question.

Sinead: This is a great question Delissa, and one to which I know a lot of our listeners can probably relate, as well as myself.

I have always found the marathon to be pretty daunting. In fact, the furthest distance I’ve run is a half marathon so far, and just the idea of having to do that twice is still a little bit scary to me.

It’s common to feel apprehensive about the marathon, but I think your idea to do a training cycle in which you prepare for the marathon, without actually racing a full marathon at the end is a great idea.

For one, it takes the pressure off as you’re not going into training every day thinking this is a means to an end.

You’re not thinking, “If I don’t hit my time today or I can’t run those last three miles of my long run today, I’m not going to be able to cut it in the marathon”, so it certainly takes the pressure off, especially if you’re feeling a bit apprehensive.

I know the feeling and I know that the pressure can be pretty debilitating, so taking that pressure away and instead just thinking of it as a trial run, thinking of this build up as just practice for the real thing, can help to prevent you from getting too nervous about it.

It will also help you to enjoy the process and just enjoy the training itself.

It’s a great idea. A marathon isn’t a sprint. You need to make sure that you give yourself time to adequately prepare for 26.2 miles.

By doing a training cycle in which you are doing marathon specific training, but at the end of which you do a half marathon instead, you’re still going to get all of the benefits from that marathon training.

You’re going to be building your aerobic capacity, helping your body to adapt to going that distance and also help you to build mental strength and build your mental capacity to go the distance.

You will gain a lot of confidence, but also a lot of physiological benefits from doing a trial build up, if you will.

From a confident standpoint, we as runners gain confidence when we can see quantitative evidence in training, that we’re able to achieve what we’re setting out to do in a race, and for a marathon, just be able to cover the 26.2 miles.

Delissa, you are clearly very well versed in half marathons. You’ve done your fair share of those, so you’re no stranger to that.

As you do get into your marathon build up, you want to progress very gradually and also you want to – as you get into the thick of your training – put the most emphasis on your long runs.

Of all the training sessions throughout your week, the marathon long run is the most important for that distance.

One thing that I will say is that there is a lot of false information surrounding the marathon long run.

A lot of runners think that they need to do multiple long runs of over 22 miles and that’s just not the case at all.

In fact, unless your goal is to finish under 3:30, you don’t necessarily need multiple long runs over 18 miles and there’s no doubt that a 21 mile long run can certainly help give you a good confidence boost, going into a 26.2 mile.

It can help you to feel as though you can go the distance; you can go that extra five miles when the time comes.

From a physiological standpoint, most runners don’t need to go that far in their long runs and they don’t need to do quite as many long runs as they might think.

For most runners who are training for a marathon, they are averaging anywhere from nine minutes to 12 minutes per mile on their long runs.

This totals out to anywhere between three hours and forty five minutes, to five hours for a long run, so we’ll just talk about the middle there.

For a pace of 10 minutes per mile, a runner will take roughly three hours and forty minutes to finish a 21 mile long run.

The total amount of time on your feet during a three-plus-hour run will break down the muscles and completely exhaust you, which leads to a significant delay in recovery time.

It also means you can’t complete more marathon specific workouts throughout the week.

While I said the long run needs to have most of your attention, these other workouts are also very important: your tempo runs, your steady state runs, and the workouts in which you’re going to be practicing the pace you want to run on race day.

These workouts are very important and if you overdo it on your long run day, you will be inhibiting your ability to hit your target times in these other workouts.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your body doesn’t see any significant increase in training benefits after running for three hours.

The majority of your physiological stimulus of long runs occurs between about 90 minutes and two and a half hours.

By doing three hours and more, you’re doing more than you need to do.

I don’t know about you, but running an hour more than is necessary doesn’t exactly appeal to me.

You have to keep in mind that the physiological benefits aren’t going to increase significantly after the two and a half to three hour mark, and you’re also, by doing more than you have to, you’re going to inhibit your ability to recover in time for your next big workout.

Another thing I’ll say is to treat that half marathon you’re going to run as your big goal race.

You want to practice the same taper you would do for a marathon and this will help simulate for one, your build up for the marathon that you’re going to do later and also it’s going to help you feel fresh and ready to roll when you get to your half marathon.

For a marathon taper, you usually want to start that taper about three weeks before the race.

In the first week, you want to reduce your weekly mileage by about 10% to 15% of your maximum.

This isn’t too difficult to reduce your mileage by 15% if you’re running, let’s say 50 miles per week.

You only need to cut about seven miles out, and this can be done by giving yourself an extra rest day or by simply cutting out two or three miles from your regular recovery runs.

You also want to reduce your long run volume by about 10% to 20% at this point.

Say you are running 20 miles, I would suggest cutting it down to somewhere between 16 and 18 miles.

Two weeks before your goal race, you want to reduce your mileage by about 25% to 30% of your maximum.

This means your long run will be shorter and your intense workouts, which should be your biggest volume days, will also be reduced.

For example, again if you’re running a 50 mile week, usually this will be reduced to about 35 to 38 miles.

You’ll also be cutting out your long run completely.

I know a lot of runners have some anxiety over this, but at this point, the hay is in the barn, so to speak and you have done all of the training that is going to benefit you, come race day.

By doing a long run at this point, you won’t be seeing the benefits of that until after race day, so there’s really just no point in doing that.

Now for the week of the race, your mileage will be significantly reduced.

In this week, you’ll be reducing your daily runs by about 50% to 60% of your normal volume.

For instance, if you’re used to running eight miles on your easy recovery days, you should be targeting five to six miles instead, and you’ll also want to do one mini fartlek session this week, just to make sure that your wheels are turning over.

It’s just kind of a freshener workout; nothing too intense.

You want to make sure you’re not overdoing it in this workout. Always err on the side of caution when you’re doing a freshener workout like this.

It’s going to help you gain a little bit of confidence and put a nice pop in your step before race day.

That just about does it for the marathon taper and I know while you’re not going to be running a marathon this time around, this will help to simulate the marathon build up that you will be doing later on.

After the half marathon, you’ll want to take a decent break.

Obviously, you have done marathon training. You’ve done a whole cycle of marathon training at this point, so you want to take a break even though you haven’t run a 26.2 mile run.

You’re going to have all that training in your legs, so I would say you know at minimum, take maybe a week off, but then see how you’re feeling at the end of that week.

If you feel sore and sluggish and just not ready to get back into training, take another week off and just see how you feel. Make sure that you are excited to get back into training and feeling rested and recovered.

Again Delissa, by doing this marathon build up and using it as a practice run, you will be gaining a lot of fitness that will carry over into your build up when you’re preparing for an actual marathon.

It’s also going to give you a ton of confidence that you are able to hit the distances you’re trying to in training.

It will also take away the pressure you would have, if you were preparing for a marathon this time round.

This will again allow you to take your time and enjoy the process, enjoy getting stronger and increase your mileage gradually.

I hope that helps you Delissa and thank you so much for submitting that question.

If you have a question you would like one of our coaches to answer in an upcoming episode, you can submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

We would love to hear from you and love to answer any questions to do with racing, training, nutrition, anything at all, we are always happy to help.

Finally, I want to thank our sponsor.

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That’s it for today guys and thank you so much again for joining me.