Training For A Marathon A Year Away

Audio Transcript

Sinead: Hi everyone. Today, we have a great question from Louis, on how to prepare for a marathon when you are still a year out.

Louis: Hello guys. I was getting ready for a marathon in, UG marathon in May, early May and unfortunately I injured myself a month prior to that.

This was supposed to be my A race but I injured my Achilles and had to stop running, so unfortunately I couldn’t go.

At this point I’m in Miami, Florida, so the hot of the summer is coming.

I think at this point I’m not going to be able to plan for a BQ race again until possibly November or more January, February.

Anyways, I have a long time in my hands now, coming out of an injury, so really the question is, if I were to plan at training between now and May of next year, so I have a year to work with, how would you advise me to break down my training between now and then?

I cannot do marathon training for a year. That will be kind of crazy.

My thoughts are to start working on a lot of base training now, and then perhaps do some half marathons in November, December, January, and really start my training for marathon in January.

I’ll be curious to know how would you split my time between now and let’s say May of next year, a full year of time to get me ready for a good quality BQ race next year in May? Thank you very much guys.

Sinead: This is a great question and Louis I’m sorry that you have experienced this Achilles Tendinitis.

It is a very frustrating injury and I’ve had it myself. I know the struggle there, but I hope you are healthy again and ready to get back into running.

Like you said, it would indeed be crazy if you were to jump back into marathon training, especially when you are a year out.

Marathon training should only be starting about three to four months before race day, so again, you don’t want to be going too hard right now, especially coming off of an injury.

The advice I would give to you would be to build up very, gradually, because your goal race isn’t for another year.

You kind of have that luxury where you can take as much time as you need to play it safe and stay on the conservative side when it comes to increasing mileage.

The first thing I would tell you Louis, is to use this time to help strengthen you Achilles tendons.

What you can do here is do eccentric heel drops, and they are great for not only preventing injuries down the line, but they’re also great for elevating pain.

If you have any lingering pain, these are really good for helping facilitate the recovery and improving circulation; basically getting blood flow to the area.

They’re just good all-around. These are called eccentric heel drops. They are pretty straight forward and I’m sure you can find a YouTube video on them.

Again, these are good for strengthening that area, and ensuring this doesn’t happen again once you get into your peak training.

All that aside, and now it’s just a matter of increasing your mileage gradually, and so they’re two golden rules.

One of them is that you want to avoid overloading during the early stages of building up your mileage. You don’t want to do any sort of sudden increases in mileage.

What you want to do is increase by that 10% each week, and then do that for three weeks, and then come down 10% for a week.

What that’s going to do is ensure that your body has enough time to catch back up with you. It allows for some recovery to take place before you keep pushing onward.

10% increase for three weeks and then a down week of 10%, and it’s going to help get your legs back under you, before you keep increasing your mileage.

Just as Louis said, this phase of training is called base training, and it’s a pretty fitting name.

It just means you are building your foundation of aerobic endurance and also a foundation on which you can later start incorporating some intensity.

Before we get to any sort of intensity, you want to make this base training phase about 10 to 12 weeks long.

What this is going to do, is give you that aerobic development that again will help you no matter the race distance.

Whether you are doing a half marathon or a marathon, this is going to be a crucial phase that you cannot overdo.

Again, you want to designate about four months to this phase, especially for you Louis, because you’re coming off of an injury.

You want to take plenty of time working back up into mileage and you’re not in any hurry because your goal race is a year away.

You’ve got plenty of time to focus on this base building phase.

Your mileage depends on your experience level. Louis, I’m not really sure what you’ve done in the past, but what you want to do in this build up is to get back up to where you were before.

Again, you’re increasing by 10% each week for three weeks. Take a down week of 10% and then you’ll just keep on going in that pattern until you get to your normal mileage, at which point you’ll want to continue on with the same pattern.

You won’t be increasing by 10%; you’ll just be keeping it kind of plateaued, just very consistent.

For three weeks, say you are doing 50 miles a week, you’ll keep those three weeks of 50 miles each week, and then you’ll take a down week and decrease your mileage by 10%.

After that week, you’ll continue taking another three weeks at 50, take a down week and so on for those four months of training.

Doing nothing but easy runs and even long runs can get a bit monotonous, so I would say that you can start incorporating some light workouts.

You can do some tempo runs and some fartlek’s, just some light workouts to break up the monotony, and start touching on those systems that you’re going to be practicing once you get into the more intense training phases down the road.

After about two, say two and a half months of pure mileage, you can start incorporating these little light workouts once or twice a week.

After that, or for the next four months, you want to start incorporating some more speed work. I think, Louis, your idea to do some tune up races, some half marathons during the fall is a great idea.

You do not want to go an entire year without racing, from the most part, just because it would be really boring, but also because it’s hard to get back into race mode after such a long time away from it.

Doing some tune up races in the fall is going to help you, first and foremost get back into race mode, but it’s also going to help simulate what you’ll be doing on goal race day.

It’s going to give you fitness and confidence and so on. I would say, pick a half marathon for the fall, maybe around November and make this something of a goal race.

You want to target this race, and do a full build up for this race because again, next May is a long way off, so you have a lot of time to have two build ups between now and then.

The buildup for the half marathon will set you up very nicely for your marathon next May.

You won’t take a long break after that half marathon. You’ll take maybe a few days off, and then you’ll start to do some light running.

About three to three and a half months before your marathon in May, you’ll start doing your marathon build up.

By that point, you will have given yourself this big foundation on which you can get through this marathon build up, healthy and ready to roll on race day.

One more thing I will recommend this summer is for you to focus on those eccentric heel drops, as you focus on strengthening areas that you know might be weak.

For runners, this is usually our hips, our hip flexors, so I would really focus on strengthening your hips, and strengthening your Achilles. That way, you’ll be healthy and ready to go, once you get into the thick of your training.

One more thing I’ll also say is, feel free to do some fun racing over the summer. It can be very hard to do it, and nothing but mileage for months on end, and so doing some fun races can help break up the monotony.

Make it so that you are familiar with the race day atmosphere. Familiar with the whole race day routine that you are going to be practicing later down the road.

Keeping in touch with that is always a good practice.

Thank you so much for the question Louis, and I wish you the best of luck as you prepare for next year’s marathon, and next year’s BQ attempt.

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

Finally, a word from our sponsor, Runners Beans.

You know the scene, you get back from your run, check your time, maybe do your stretches and then perhaps you reach for your protein powder or some chocolate milk to start the muscle recovery process.

The vitamins and minerals of your body think, “Awesome, we’ll be next,” but the truth is, they don’t have the time to think that, as they’re pretty busy carrying out the thoroughly one billion chemical reactions occurring in your body every second in every cell.

Do you think you’re tired? Unfortunately nine times out of 10, you and thousands of runners neglect these busy little micro nutrients, and this neglect not only causes performance to fizzle, but it can also potentially cause long-term damage to your body.

The team at Runners Beans know firsthand what it’s like to run on empty, and the problem they kept coming up against, is the lack of supplements that are designed for runners, so they set about creating their own.

They knew they did not want to be popping pills three times a day, but when they started looking, a dose of two to four pills a day seemed unavoidable to get the levels needed as runners.

Instead of relying on what had gone before, they found the innovators and the industry and have produced a breakthrough liquid formula.

Research shows liquid may have up to 88% better absorption than tablets and capsules. Runners Beans has helped me train harder, recover faster and feel so much better doing it, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Be sure to check it out at runnersconnect.net/runnersbeans, and use the code EXTRA KICK, to receive a 10% discount off all purchases.

Thanks for listening to the podcast and have a great run day.