Since before signing up for the marathon I’ve been making sure that I do my running training regularly. I’m currently doing at least 4 runs during the week, pushing for 5 (all during lunch times). The route that I run around the city is approximately 6.2km, which is a good distance to cover while still having time either side of the run for prepration and showering up so that I don’t offend my coworkers.
On top of the 5 runs a week, I have a rest day on Saturday and a long run on Sundays. So far, the long runs aren’t as long as I’d like them to be. To date, the reasons have been to me not being fit enough and me not timing my runs to make sure that I have enough daylight to finish them off before it gets dark.
Today I did about 11km in just under 54 mins. I was quite chuffed. Not because it was a blindingly fast run, but because at the end of it I felt amazing! I got home as the sky turned black, but could have easily continued for at least another 5 perhaps 10km. I hope to continue feeling this good as the training progresses. I also really need to get myself a stopwatch/heart monitor so I can get some quality stats on what I’m doing.
While I’m here, time to shout out to a mate otherwise known as “Nugget”. Congrats to him on his awesome time for a 10km run down in Sydney today. Great work mate 
May 6, 2008
Skip the Sunday long, it’s a frequent mistake made by avid beginners. It’s too much training. 5 days a week is enough to win the Olympics if your training is conducted right.
Remember, every other day should always be an easy day, even if that means slower/shorter distance. You will find your best results come from 5 days of hard/easy followed by no more than a walk on the weekend.
A couple months of 6 days a week, you will be seriously overtrained and you will probably conclude that the problem is that you aren’t training hard enough yet. So you’ll try to start training 7 days a week, which is about the same as trying to leap off the top of your house flapping your arms thinking once you build up your strength you’ll be able to fly.
So take it easy often, it’s almost as important as knowing when to go really hard.
My best marathon was a long, long time ago, 2:18 in 1984. Strangely enough, I had been sick for the month prior and just went out thinking of it as a fun run. I was over my cold and feeling enormously rested and fresh. Nobody was more surprised than me when I started cranking out 5:45 miles one after the other without feeling tired in the least. On my hardest training sessions I rarely went under 6 minutes at best for 20K.
Anybody can train until they collapse. Training until you improve is a lot harder. Knowing how to treat yourself to regular extended periods of rest is critical to your best performance.
May 6, 2008
Hi Biff!
Many thanks for the insightful comment. It’s not often someone takes the time to post information like that.
I’ve heard mixed feelings about the long run on Sundays. About 80% of the people I’ve spoken to have said that the Sunday long run is a good idea; the other 20% have said don’t bother. It’s a hard one for me to judge as I’m hardly an experienced marathon runner (I’ve only done one before). I guess I have felt that I should look for the long runs on Sundays because I need to get used to just pushing through the km without stopping.
I have done a bit of reading on the topic in the past and noticed that there’s a surprising amount of people who think that marathon training should include marathons. I’m not really a believer in that. I never ran more than 24km (ish) when I trained for my first one, and I think it was a good move. I know a few people who have gone up to 38km during their training, aiming to peak at 42km on the day of the event. Most of them hit a wall early in the run and struggled to come in under 5:30. I don’t want to make that mistake
During the weeks I alternate between going hard and taking it easy. I have a good friend who’s recently done an ironman, and he’s constantly telling me to make sure that I keep my heart rate low while doing certain runs. He also tells me that emphasis on the easy runs is just as, if not more, important than the hard runs.
For me it’s tempting to push myself as hard as I can go when I run. I tend to be OK at resisting temptation most of the time, but I know I could do better.
So you recommend that I just stick to 5 days a week, alternating hard and easy runs (bearing in mind that I can only really do around the 6 to 7km mark each day due to time), and skipping the long run on Sundays? Do you think that I should throw a longer run in over the weekends every now and then? If I don’t do a long run on Sundays, should I just do an easy run of say 3 or 4km just to stretch the legs?
2:18 is a phenominal time! One day I would love to come in under 3 hours. With this next marathon I hope to come in under 4 hours (aim to knock 30 mins off my previous effort a few years back). I take my hat off to you, that really is an amazing effort. What kind of training did you do leading up to your illness? Which marathon was it?
Thanks again for the comment mate. I haven’t seen you post around here before, so welcome to the site too
I look forward to reading more of your insights (if you have time to write them). Your advice is very much appreciated.
Cheers!
May 6, 2008
That was the All-Army Trier Marathon in Germany in 1984. I had run about 8 months earlier in the Baumholder Marathon with a really appalling time of 2:47, which was 8th place but considering I was running 120 miles a week wasn’t all that great a performance.
I was young and didn’t really know what I was doing. I just ran as much as I could, as hard as I could, when I was sore, when I was sick, when I felt terrible, when I had nosebleeds, I still ran. I ran in the morning, in the evenings, both days on the weekends. I thought training meant training no matter what.
So I came down with severe bronchitis (predictable) and the Army doctor told me no exercise of any kind until my next appointment. So I slept and ate. I noticed in a few days my nosebleeds stopped and I put on a little healthy fat. Then I started sleeping a full 9 hours a night and my bronchitis began to clear up. It took a whole month to cough up all of it, then since I was already signed up for Trier I figured I might as well go. I had no idea it would be the best marathon I would ever run.
The problem is the human body can’t recover from that level of exercise. You grow progressively weaker and more feeble over time. There may be some adaptation that takes place (pulse grows lower as blood pressure rises) but at a certain point you will go downhill and not improve any further even if you hold your existing fitness.
Now that I am much older, I know that what I should have been doing was about 70 miles a week, three hard days (M-W-F) and just easy fun runs on the days off. Then on the weekends, a slow easy walk for no other reason than to shake out the soreness and help your body flush out waste products from training including lactic acid.
A great way to determine if you are overtraining (first pioneered by Percy Cerutty) is to see if your blood pressure is higher when you wake up. If it is, your body is still trying to recover from your last training session, which means anything else you do to it is damage. So do an easy day and test it again the following morning. The morning it is not elevated and you feel otherwise fresh and your soreness is gone, go out and run hard as hell that day. That’s the day you are fully recovered and can now attempt to stimulate your body to develop again.
This pattern is the same amongst all athletes because whatever your natural gifts, your physiology operates the same way, even if you were born running a 5 minute mile. You cannot attempt to cut new inroads until you have recovered from the last hard training session or you are tearing yourself down rather than building yourself up.
I hope this helps, good luck with your marathon and I wish it will be as great an experience for you as it was for me the first time I ran one.
May 8, 2008
Interesting stuff. I’m certainly not planning on running a marathon any time soon, but I’ve started cycling 4.4 miles a day to work and back in the last few weeks which was hard going to start with, but I’m now powering up the hills without much problem. I’m sure (I hope) if I keep this up my beer belly will eventually subside.
I’m hoping to do some longer rides and possibly another long charity ride. I did a 50 mile ride last summer in a fairly easy (though painful on the arse) 6 hours, though that did include too many food/drink/rest stops as we were cycling with a group of people who hadn’t trained for it.
I just wondered if you had any tips on building up fitness by cycling? By the sounds of it, doing a long ride each evening and at the weekend is out of the question…
May 8, 2008
@Biff: Thanks for the in-depth information again mate. It’s very enlightening. You’ve forced me to reevaluate the training I’m doing and have a good think about what’s good and bad. I’ll be doing a bit of research on various training methods and reading up on the importance of the right balance of training types as well as rest. Thank you for the inspiration
Thanks also for the wishes — this will be my second marathon, and I hope I enjoy it as much as the first one!
May 9, 2008
The real truth about most things in life is just too counter-intuitive for the average person to ever grasp.
Most of the professional athletes you see on television are successful not because they necessarily are the best in terms of absolute potential *nor* are they training correctly, rather they are the ones who survived their training. Other people may have had more potential but like everyone they overtrained and eventually ran their metabolic capacity into the ground. Those few athletes who survive their crappy and mostly wasteful training, we call champions.
Arthur Jones and Ellington Darden pioneered a lot of these ideas back in the 70’s, but as Mike Mentzer once said, the first thing that a new generation forgets is a recently discovered truth.
So bodybuilders train until they are falling apart and achieving little, then they turn to steroids and everybody wants to know their secret. Runners run themselves into the hospital and when they get out and suddenly run the best time of their lives after being forced to recuperate, everybody wants to know their secret. Swimmers swim until they develop chronic soreness and then when they goof off for a month and barely train, immediately afterwards setting a world record, everybody wants to know their secret.
About 1% of athletes in the world actually benefit from their training and they are the ones who know how to rest. All the others are just hoping to survive their bad practices and achieve some stimulation.
For example, how many cyclists do you know who get 9.5 hours of sleep a night? Do they know that if they started to do so, it would be better than the most powerful steroids they could acquire on the black market? Most cyclists try to cycle a couple hundred miles a week, grab a couple hours each night of sleep and then keep themselves awake during the way with coca-cola and carbs. When they notice they have stopped improving, they decide they have peaked and should now turn to performance enhancers.
Exercise without proper rest is a lot like trying to renovate your house by always tearing something down but never actually getting around to rebuilding. No rebuild, no progress and therefore any further exercise is just doing more damage.
When you guys are old and cynical like me you’ll be experts on this stuff, when it can no longer do you much good. That’s the problem with learning how stuff really works.
Instead of trying to squeeze in two exercise sessions a day, instead try to squeeze in a nap in the afternoon. I guarantee you, then you’ll see some progress like you wouldn’t believe.