Why Marathon Training Starts Now: Your First 32 Weeks
Thirty Two Weeks, and the Two Reactions I Always Get
Every autumn I stand in front of a room of runners who have just got a place in a spring marathon, and I offer them a plan that runs up to 32 weeks. A 20 week marathon plan and a 12 week pre-training plan.
There are two reactions and it's nearly always one or the other.
The first is that 32 weeks is far too long, and they'll be sick of the sight of it by February. The second is that 32 weeks is nowhere near enough, and that they'd need years to get ready for something like this.
There's something in both, yet neither is right.
Here's what 32 weeks actually is. It's a 12 week pre-training plan, which offers a gradual build up, and then a 20 week marathon plan on the end of it. It isn't 32 weeks of hard training. It never would be.
What it gives you is time. Time to get running into your week before there's any pressure on it, and time for the things that are going to go wrong to go wrong without wrecking everything.
Ours starts on Monday 14 September for London next April. If you're reading this a fortnight from now, or a month from now, that's still fine. Twenty eight weeks works. Twenty six works. The number matters a lot less than getting going while there's nothing riding on it.
Sixteen Weeks Isn't Wrong, It's Just Tight
Most plans you'll find online run to 16 weeks. Some are 12. I'm not going to pretend they're rubbish, because they aren't. If you already run four times a week and you've been doing it for years, 16 weeks of focused marathon training will do the job.
But a 16 week plan makes two assumptions.
The first is that on day one you can already do the training it's asking of you. It doesn't build you up to its own starting point, because that isn't its job. So if you're coming back after a few years off, or you run twice a week when the weather's nice, or you've never run a marathon before, you spend the first six weeks catching up and the next ten hanging on.
The second assumption is the bigger one. It assumes you get 16 clear weeks.
Nobody gets 16 clear weeks.
Twenty Weeks Is Never Twenty Weeks
Our 20 week block starts in December for a spring marathon. Write those weeks out and start crossing things off.
Christmas and New Year. Two weeks where your time isn't really your own.
A holiday. Most people have one booked in there somewhere.
Illness. It's winter. You'll probably get a cold or two.
A niggle. Not a proper injury. Just a week of being sensible about a sore calf.
A weekend you can't move. A wedding, a work trip, somebody's sixtieth.
A practice race. We usually put a half marathon in, and that needs an easier week either side of it.
The taper. The last two or three weeks, where we deliberately drop the training right down so you get to the start line fresh instead of exhausted.
Do that and 20 weeks of real training comes out closer to 14 or 15. That isn't bad planning. That's what a winter looks like when you've got a job and a family.
Now do the same subtraction on 16 weeks.
That's the argument, really. We don't use 32 weeks because we think you need 32 weeks of hard work. We use it because life is going to take a chunk out of the middle, and we'd rather it came out of the part we can afford to lose.
Getting Into a Routine Takes Longer Than You Think
Here's the bit people don't plan for. When you get a new plan, the first couple of weeks aren't totally about training. They're admin.
You're working out which days actually work for training. You're finding out what easy means, and that it's slower than you thought. You're finding out whether you're a morning runner or an evening runner, which isn't something you can decide in advance. You're squaring it with the people you live with.
You're learning that Tuesday never works and Thursday always does.
None of that is fitness. All of it has to happen, and it takes a few weeks.
Do it now, while the long run is about an hour, and the shape of your week is already there by the time the long run becomes two hours, then two and a half, then three. You're only changing the size of the runs. You're not building the routine at the same time.
Leave it until December and you're doing both at once, in the dark, with the race close enough to worry about. That's where people come unstuck.
Starting Now Doesn't Mean Doing More Now
Every year, a few weeks in, somebody tells me they're well ahead of the plan and doing a lot more than I've asked for.
I'm always pleased they're keen. Then I tell them to back off.
We're not trying to get you marathon fit in September. If you're running big numbers now, you've got nowhere left to go when it actually counts. And it isn't only about injury. Plenty of people don't get hurt, they just get bored and flat and quietly stop, months before the part that mattered.
On injury, a recent study of over 5,000 runners and half a million runs found something that surprised a lot of coaches. Injury risk tracked the length of a single run against the longest run you'd done in the previous month, far more than it tracked your weekly mileage. Around one in ten overuse injuries turned up inside a single session. Marathon training hands you that chance most weeks, and early on, when you're keen, is exactly when you'll take it.
Pre-training runs should feel easy. If you finish one thinking that was hardly worth getting changed for, it's doing its job.
You Can't Cheat It
You can't cram a marathon and you can't wing it. Twenty six miles is a long way and it finds out anybody who tried to skip a step. That's one of the best things about it. You put the work in, you get the day.
I've never met anyone standing on a marathon start line wishing they'd done a week less. Everyone's stood there wishing they had one more run in the bank.
You can't have that on the day. You can have it now.
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