Running the Day Before a Marathon

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Runners Connect Run to the Top Extra Kick Podcast. I am back with you after a long break.

I’ve been doing some travelling, also working on some awesome stuff for you coming up.

With that said, I want to get into today’s question from Rob. Rob, go ahead and take it away.

Rob: Hi, I’m from Virginia, and I really enjoy the daily podcast and all the resources at Runners Connect.

My question is about running the day before a marathon. Some plans have it, some plans don’t.

I’m wondering what Runners Connect thinks about running the day before a marathon, and the running plan for the entire week before the marathon.

Thanks very much.

Jeff: Rob, that is a great question.

To give you the simple answer, I believe that you should always run the day before a marathon. I don’t think there is a situation where you shouldn’t be.

The only reason I would say potentially not, is if you are injured, and you’re giving it a Hail Mary for race day, and you’re just kind of hoping that things are going to work out.

But the reasons that you should be running the day before a race are a few.

The first and the most important is that running the day before the race is going to help increase blood flow.

Basically, what you want to be doing, the day before the race is running anywhere from 10-20 minutes, so nothing very far, 20 minutes being the most, all completely easy.

No reason to pick up the pace or do marathon pace. Just keep it easy.

And what that’s going to do is increase blood flow to your legs, and get everything flushed out of your system, and it’s going to make you store more glycogen for the marathon the next day.

The next day, you are also going to wake up feeling less tight because you’re going to get that blood flowing, stretch out the muscles, those types of things.

The other important reason, and I think this is probably the most important, is that running a day before the race stimulates the central nervous system.

For those that don’t know, the neuromuscular system or ?zenus [03:43] is the communication vehicle between what your brain and your muscles do.

When you’re working the central nervous system, it responds very quickly to new stimuli because the growth and recover cycle is very short.

You can make small improvements to your central nervous system or neuromuscular system, in just a day, and conversely, you can actually have fitness losses in your muscular system within a day.

That’s why sometimes, if you take a day or two off from an injury, you’ll come back and, part of it is mental, but you feel like you’ve lost a bunch of fitness.

Let’s say you miss one workout or you miss two days and you come back to do a workout, you’ll often feel really crappy and just not good.

The reason for that is that your neuromuscular system isn’t firing on all cylinders, and so to prevent that from happening, you want to run easy, 10-20 minutes a day before the race.

The last reason is that it calms the nerves, and it becomes routine.

Obviously, you’ve been training for this marathon for quite a long time and running is a significant part of your weekly and daily life.

Keeping that in check really helps, it gives you a little bit of a structure to the day because you’re going to structure your day around your run, when are going to do it, and it helps mentally to set you at ease.

I think the reason that many people don’t want to run the day before the race, or maybe some schedules have it that they aren’t running the day before the race, is that there’s this fear that you’re going to get tired.

That’s one of those things where I think it’s a mental fallacy, because if you think about the training that you’ve done up to the marathon, you’ve done significant mileage, you’ve done hard workouts, you’ve done long, long, runs, and then you’ve come back the day or day after and run really well.

For example, if you’re running four, five days a week, you’re always having a day doing a run the day before your workout, and that run is usually – depending on how much your volume is – anywhere from three to eight, 10 miles.

You’re doing those runs and then recovering from them, and then doing another run the next day. So, there’s absolutely no reason to think that running 10-15 minutes is going to get you tired.

Like I mentioned in my first reason to run, it will help you store more glycogen because it’s going to open up your muscles.

Your muscles are going to want to absorb more glycogen when you eat that day. So definitely no reason not to run the day before the race.

To get to the bigger question that Rob asked. What’s a general structure for running the week of the marathon.

I’m going to give you some general ball park numbers here, and obviously, this is going to differ, depending on what you’ve found has worked for you in the past, or what you know about your body.

The week of the race, I’m usually reducing your total volume by 50-60%.

It’s not too significant. I think if you go too far in the other direction, where you don’t run the whole week before the race, or run significantly less, that opens you up to all the problems that I mentioned with the central nervous system and those types of things, where mentally, and just even with your CNS, you start to feel very flat.

I like a reduction of about 50-60 %, to put a ball park on that.

Say that a normal easy day for you during your training cycle was eight miles, so let’s say that’s your normal volume, then you’ll be doing five to six miles for your runs instead.

And then I like to include one mini fartlek session or a bit of a marathon- pace run with a little bit of a fartlek at the end.

For an example, I might do two to three miles at marathon pace and then a good rest, three to five minutes of easy running or walking or rest, and then something like maybe four times a minute or four times 90 seconds, a little bit faster than marathon pace.

What we’re doing here with that long rest, and not a hard workout at all, is we are kind of getting marathon pace. It’s going to be about a week before you get anything hard, so you’re giving your body that chance to run a little bit harder.

Remember what marathon pace feels like, kind of get out there and work a little harder.

The fartlek session or the couple minutes of harder running, is going to turn over the legs a little more, kind of give you some confidence, stimulate that central nervous system, kind of get all systems firing.

It’s not enough where you are going to produce any amount of fatigue at all. That type of workout, you can go as little as two miles at marathon pace with maybe three times a minute, is a little bit faster than a marathon pace, maybe 10K pace, half marathon pace, with a good two, three-minute rest in between.

Those types of things, that’s going to be something super easy.

If you’re running more mileage, maybe you’re running 60-70, 80 miles a week, you could do something like three to four miles at marathon pace and four to six times one minute with a two, three-minute rest in between of those, something like that.

Then if you are going to take a day off throughout the week, I usually like to do it two days before the race, so that’s kind of that balance where you’re getting the recovery but by running the day before the race, we’d go through all those things that we talked about: central nervous system, improving blood flow, storing glycogen, all those types of things.

That’s what a week before the marathon might look like. Again, you adjust based on what you know about yourself, and all those little things.

Rob, I hope that answered your question.

Thanks so much everybody for listening today and hope you have a great run today.