The Basics of Running a Marathon

 Why Run a Marathon?

 Before you start preparing to run a marathon, you should know why you’re doing it. After all, deciding to run a marathon isn’t like deciding what to eat for dinner or what to order at your favorite coffee shop. It’s a pretty big decision that requires commitment. So why you’re doing it is an important first question to ask yourself. You may want to run a marathon for many reasons:

 To get fit: Training for a marathon is a great way to improve your aerobic fitness (not to mention get a great butt). Nothing gets you fit like running. Because running involves your whole body, it trains all your muscles. It also drives your heart rate up higher than any other activity, which is a powerful stimu lus to improve your cardiovascular fitness.

 To lose weight: Running is one of the best ways to lose weight because it burns more calories than just about every other activity. And because training for a marathon means a whole lot of running, that’s quite a lot of calories. Most people, even seasoned runners, drop at least a few pounds during marathon training

To challenge yourself: Humans often like to undertake difficult endeavors — to set tough goals and go after them. What better way to challenge yourself than to run 26.2 miles? Doing so is both a physical challenge and a test of your mental strength.

To accomplish something and improve your self-esteem: Trying — and better yet, succeeding at — something you think is difficult feels good. It feeds your ego and makes you feel better about yourself. Even though running a marathon is becoming more popular, those who do it are still the minority.

To bond with your friends and family: Running a marathon can be very social, as you and your friends and family can share the experience together. Many people train for and run marathons together. The support (and the shame factor when you flake out of a group training run) can provide a lot of motivation, and those long runs offer plenty of time to catch up with your fellow runners.

  To raise money for charity: Running a marathon is a great way to raise money for a good cause. When you run for char ity, you’re not just running for you anymore; you feel a mea sure of responsibility. You’re running for kids with leukemia or for your mom with cancer. You’re doing something good for yourself and others.

 To assuage your midlife crisis: Getting your mind off your age is actually a very common reason to run a marathon. Lots of people make big decisions and like to shake things up a bit when they hit those milestone birthdays, like 40 or 50 (or 60 and beyond). Doing something challenging is a great distrac tion from those creeping anxieties about aging. The amazing benefit of running a marathon as a distraction is that it has the power to make you feel younger.

 To cross it off your bucket list: The marathon has become a popular bucket-list item, one of those things to do before you, well, kick the bucket. A lot of people want to experience the challenge of training for and running 26.2 miles just for the sake of doing it. It’s right up there with skydiving (only safer)

 Making the Time to Train for a Marathon

Some things you can do at the last minute, like picking up dinner at a fast-food restaurant, mailing your taxes on April 15, and sending your twin brother an e-card because you failed to remember his birthday until 9:54 p.m. Didn’t expect to see “training for a marathon” on that list, did you? I hope not; training for a marathon is a huge endeavor that normally takes months and that you need to take seriously. For many reasons, it’s not something you can do (or should try to do) in a few weeks, and risk of injury is probably the major reason to take your time. The biggest risk of injury comes when you run too much too soon, before your bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments are able to completely adapt

Great strides: The growth of the marathon

The marathon has grown faster than a bodybuilder on steroids. According to MarathonGuide.com, 299,000 people completed a marathon in the United States in 2000, growing to 503,000 in 2010. In 2000, 62.5 percent of marathoners were male, and 37.5 percent were female. In 2010, 58.8 percent were male, and 41.2 percent were female

Many popular marathons are held in the United States, which hosted a whopping 483 of them in 2010. The largest marathon in the United States is the ING New York City Marathon, which boasted 44,704 finishers in 2010. The next five largest marathons (by number of finishers in 2010) are the Bank of America Chicago Marathon (36,159), the Boston Marathon (22,540), the LA Marathon (22,403), the Marine Corps Marathon (21,874), and the Honolulu Marathon (20,169).

The Basics of Running a Marathon

The amount of time to prepare for a marathon varies from person to person, according to circumstances, goals, and a lot of other things, including

Your prior running experience 

How many days per week you plan to run

How quickly your body adapts to training and how much recovery time you need, which influence your risk of injuries

How fast you want to run the marathon 

If you’re a new runner, I recommend running a few days per week for at least a year before running a marathon. Run some other races, like 5Ks and 10Ks, and work your way up to the half-marathon and marathon. That’s the safest way to do it. The marathon requires maturity, in terms of both training and experience. Trying to run a marathon without first becoming a runner is like trying to earn a PhD without first earning a bachelor’s degree. You increase the risk of injuries and of making training and racing mistakes.

The exact amount of time you need to train for a marathon depends on how long and how often you’ve been running

If you’ve been running up to 20 miles per week for at least a year but have never run a marathon before, give yourself eight to ten months to prepare for it.

If you’ve been running for a few years and have run a marathon before, give yourself six to eight months to prepare

If you’re one of those speedy types who runs every day, sleeps with your running shoes on, and makes running a marathon as much a habit as eating pasta and soaking your legs in cold water, give yourself enough time to fully recover from your last marathon and to ramp your mileage back up before attempting another one. Typically, that means about four to six months, especially if you want to run your next marathon faster.

Depending on your level and goals, you can run a marathon on 5 to 15 hours of training per week. That includes the (increasingly) long run you’ll do each week.

Training for a marathon isn’t just a time commitment for you; it’s a time commitment for your family, too. So unless you’re single with no responsibilities other than yourself, you need to let your family know how important running a marathon is to you so they can be supportive. Someone has to watch the kids when you’re out running for three hours on Sunday morning!

Starting to Prepare for a Marathon

Assuming you’ve made the decision to run a marathon (which is why you’re reading this book), how do you begin to prepare for it? Do you just go out and run 20 miles? No, please don’t. Building up to that distance takes time. Here’s what you need to do to start preparing

For example, one of the biggest mistakes runners make is thinking that to run faster in races, they need to run faster in workouts. So they run their workouts faster than their current fitness level dictates. I once coached a college runner who ran around 19 minutes for a cross-country 5K and told me she wanted to be trained like a 17:30 5K runner. So I told her to run a 17:30 5K and then I’d train her like a 17:30 5K runner

Races, which tell you your current level of fitness, dictate your training pace, not the other way around. As a marathon runner, you don’t do workouts to practice running faster. You do workouts to improve the physiological characteristics that enable you to run farther and hold a faster pace for longer (see Chapter 3 for details). Think of an assembly line: If you want to make more products, increasing the number of workers (physiological characteristics) so you have more assembly lines to do the work is a better strategy than increasing the speed at which the assembly line workers work. The goal of training is to obtain the greatest benefit while incurring the least amount of stress, so you should run as slow as you can to obtain the workout’s desired goal. Running faster than you need to only increases fatigue without any extra benefit.

Because the marathon is aerobic — that is, the activity requires that your muscles use oxygen — your training should focus on your body’s ability to use more oxygen. For most people, the key is the weekly mileage and long runs. Unless you’re an advanced runner with years of running behind you, your marathon training program shouldn’t include a lot of interval training — periods of faster running interspersed with short recovery intervals. Initially, your main focus is to become as aerobically developed as possible to improve your endurance. I talk about how to do that in Chapter 5.

As an experienced runner who wants to get better, your training matures, growing from a basic outline of mileage and long runs to more mileage, tempo runs that train you to hold a faster aerobic pace, and interval training to boost your speed (see Chapter 7 for more about interval training). You progress from higher volume and lower intensity to lower volume and higher intensity, although you must always pay attention to the volume of training given the importance of mileage for the marathon. If this sounds complicated, you’re right, it is. Even if you’ve run a marathon before, it can be daunting. I tell you how to mix training components together in a training plan in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 (for beginners, intermediate runners, and advanced runners, respectively).

No plan is ingrained in stone. You must always leave room for adjustment based on things like how much time you have to train, how much recovery you need, how fatigued you are, and so on. For women, the ever-changing hormonal environment and menstrual cycle issues also come into play, so a woman’s program should always be open to change.

Training for the Big Race: An Overview 

Training is complicated, sure, but some basic concepts underlie a solid marathon training program. Here are a few basic, but very important, points of training:

Balance training with recovery. All the adaptations you make that enable you to run farther and faster occur when you’re not running, so take recovery as seriously as you take your training. I talk more about recovery in Chapter 12.

Mix up your paces. If you run slow all the time, you’ll just become a slow runner. Train using the whole continuum of paces, from very slow to very fast, to enhance both your endurance and your speed. I talk more about improving your speed in Chapter 7.

Respect the distance. Twenty-six miles is a long way to run. Respect the distance by preparing adequately for it. Don’t take a nonchalant approach to the marathon. Confidence comes from being prepared, so prepare yourself.

Run a lot. There’s no way around the fact that running a marathon requires a lot of preparation. Although you don’t have to run more than 100 miles per week like the best marathon runners in the world, you still have to run a lot. Training is the key to running the marathon successfully. You must run at least a few times during the week in addition to your long run on the weekend.

Run long. You need to do many long runs to prepare for the marathon. Your longest run should fall somewhere between 20 and 24 miles, or three to three and a half hours, whichever comes first. If you’re an advanced runner, you may run longer than 24 miles before the marathon. I talk about long runs in Chapter 6.

As you train for your marathon, take a few risks, and gain strength and momentum from your running to help you see those risks through. Remember that though there may be a chance of failing, people take risks because the chance of failing makes success taste even sweeter.