Our Greatest Marathon Training Advice
Here at Outside, we always have marathons on our minds, and we’ve given relatively numerous great tips and proposals on simple strategies to triumph over the distance. But now, we’ve put jointly a cheat sheet filled with our best advice that will help you weigh down your next marathon, whether or not or no longer that means crossing the top line for the main time or clocking a PR.
1. Create a Game Plan
“This may sound obvious, but I can say from recent personal experience that if you don’t have a plan of attack, it’s easy to get sidelined by doubt and start waffling. My plan makes me feel accountable—it’s right there in black and white.”
2. Your Life Will Revolve Around Running
Which way the parents on your existence need to be on board. “It’s really important to get your training in while making the fewest ripples in your household…You have to balance running with the other parts of your life. Get your kids and partner on board with a plan that works for you—and them.”
3. F*** the Haters
“I literally didn’t know how long a marathon was until I looked it up. Then I researched, on the internet, what a good marathon time was. There are all these running community chat rooms, and there was this consensus where anything under four hours is respectable, but there’s a whole lot of hate out there for people who run slower marathons, slower being anything over four hours. Then I realized that’s ridiculous. This challenge is so engaging that it’s enough if someone does it—regardless of what the time is. I felt like the world accepted that, although there is still this judgment in the community of pace-ists.”
4. Choose Your Race Wisely
If you’re a first-timer seeking to merely hit the top line, or if your purpose is to set a blistering PR, the route problems. “There’s no easy way to cover 26.2 miles on foot, but not all marathons are equally grueling. For first-timers, opting for a tame race is generally a smart move. Keen as you might be to jump into the deep end, starting your marathon career on a less difficult course is a good way to build confidence without wrecking your body. (There’s plenty of time to sign up for orgies of self-destruction like the Pikes Peak Marathon later on.)”
5. Prioritize the Long Runs
And this 1 comes from Kathryn Switzer, 70-year-old running legend and the main girl to officially run the Boston Marathon: “Get the miles in. The difference between running a 10K and marathon is the difference between writing an article and a book. You’ve gotta get them miles in, but I wouldn’t worry for your first one about speed if your goal is really just to finish.”
6. Get Buzzed
“At crucial points in the race, caffeine can almost trick your body into feeling better than it should…Get caffeine, carbohydrates, and sugars via caffeinated gels during the race to help maintain energy. And, of course, drinking water or a sports drink and hitting all the hydration stations is also necessary.”
7. Skip the Touristing Until After Race Day
Although it’s specifically exhausting for a race that you simply adventure for, it’s crucial that you simply stay off your ft the day and night time time previous than a race. “Race organizers don’t make that easy by scheduling interesting expos and panel discussions the day before where you are on your feet, walking around, expending energy. Discipline yourself to keep that to a minimum, making a conscious effort to sit and rest, with your feet up as much as possible. Don’t squander the good work you’ve done during your taper in the last day or two.”
8. Relish Rest
“There are 3 training regulations: specificity, overload, and leisure. You will have to use they all. In other words, if you want to see results, you need to…embody enough amounts of leisure and recovery to capitalize on improvements. As a commonplace tenet, you shouldn’t stack more than 2 days of intense educate jointly or paintings the equivalent muscle crew carefully 2 days in a row. If you don’t use the other days for recovery, your paintings would perhaps backfire and likewise you won’t see the required improvements.”
9. Nutrition Is Half the Battle
Just because you’re running a larger number of miles doesn’t suggest chances are you'll handle your eating conduct with reckless abandon. “Ask an elite athlete how vitamin components into her potency, and he or she’ll without doubt tell you that it’s merely as essential as her training plan. In many cases, she may even identify it the maximum essential factor.”
10. This Is Not a Weight-Loss Regimen
Your body craves fine quality power whilst you’re asking it to churn by means of 40- or 50-mile weeks, and your potency will for sure bear while you don’t feed your body enough fuel. “When you start your training program, shift your focus to fueling your body to meet the increased performance demands, not on counting calories. If you use more energy, you have to take in more energy. If you perform poorly in workouts or are lethargic between workouts, you might not be taking in enough calories. You can run the numbers and see a calorie deficit, but when you exercise a lot and don’t get enough calories, metabolism slows to a crawl. You get the opposite of what you’re looking for.”
11. Show Your Feet Some Love
Strong ft don’t merely make you faster. They moreover lend a hand stave off injuries. Weak ft don’t. “A 2014 analysis came upon that via emerging foot energy, athletes moreover advanced their one-legged long bounce, vertical bounce, and 50-yard dash events. Last year, throughout the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers proposed a complete new paradigm: the foot-core gadget, which stresses intrinsic muscle tissues similar to the abductor halluces and the flexor digitorum brevis, which were in large part disregarded via clinicians.”
12. Learn to Fly
Work some tempo workouts into your training, specifically while you’re seeking to PR. An actual favorite is the negative-split long run. “You want to go 18 to 22 miles total, with the first half roughly one minute per mile slower than marathon race pace. Run the second half at your goal marathon pace.”
13. Focus on Feel
Although this nugget comes from racing great Joan Benoit Samuelson, we will be able to all learn reasonably something from her ode to running via in point of fact really feel relatively than clocking a rigid internet web page it doesn’t topic what. “I’m certainly not running at the level that I once was, nor am I training at that level. I do what I can reasonably do. I don’t have any rhyme or reason to my training except to run the way I feel on that particular day. If I feel good, I run hard; if I don’t, I run easy. I just try to keep things simple. [Same goes] in a race. If I feel like I can go out hard, I’ll go out hard.”
14. Find Your Race-Day Ally
That one that will hearken in your “fussing about optimizing sleep, hydration, and fueling habits,” get up early and devour breakfast with you previous than the race, ship all necessarily probably the most embarrassing signs to cheer, plan a post-race brunch and bash, and “brag about you on social media.”
15. Get Swole
“When I first heard that training to squat more than my body weight would help me improve as an endurance athlete, I wasn’t sure I could pick up a 30-pound dumbbell. In my mind, weight lifting was a thing for protein-guzzling meatheads who use words like swole. I’m a five-two, 108-pound runner. Hill repeats are the closest I’ve come to strength training. And like most endurance athletes—and most women—I was terrified of two things: getting bulky and getting hurt…Training to increase my squat strength broke me down to a place where I didn’t have a choice [but to take time off]. Then it built me up stronger.”
16. Train Your Gut Like You Do Your Legs
“While GI distress is common—especially in runners—it’s also highly individual, both in how it presents and in how severely you suffer…[But] you don’t have to be at the mercy of your intestines. You can, at least to some degree, train your gut like you train your glutes and your lungs. Getting it right, however, takes time, work, and possibly some unpleasant experimentation.”
17. Pound Fluids and Carbs Earlier Than You Want To
“Attempting to play catch-up later in the race is a dangerous and mostly doomed proposition. For one, you process sugar and food poorly near the end of a race. Also, as you tire, you forget to fuel properly later in the race. Don’t get to the point of being hungry or thirsty. Load on the front end.”
18. Buy and Replace Two Pairs of Shoes
“Even if you have a pair that you absolutely love, the muscles in your feet get used to cushioning in certain places, and when you use a different shoe, you help balance out any weaknesses you might have in a certain place. Over the long haul, training in different shoes may even reduce risk of injury since you won’t always be placing the same level of stress on the same parts of your foot…[Also,] shoes are not immortal. The typical lifespan of a shoe is between 300 and 600 miles, but they’ll start to feel a little different after about 200 miles.” Replace them.
19. Running Is a Whole-Body Sport
Treat it as such to forestall harm and defend yourself in opposition to overuse breakdowns. “The posterior chain—mainly your glutes, hamstrings, and lower back—has gained a reputation as the oft-neglected muscle group that’s responsible for many problems in the lower half of the body, such as IT band, Achilles, and knee or hip issues. While that’s true, putting in extra work to strengthen only your backside neglects other muscles groups like the quads, creating more imbalances. Strengthening your entire body is important for both treating and preventing injury.”
20. Don’t Cram
“A big part of racing is showing up rested and ready. That begins about a week out with the taper. You want to keep running, including your fast surges, but do fewer miles every day. Most important, don’t try to test yourself or put in an extra-hard or extra-long workout to get ready—it takes about eight days for training to affect the body, so you’ll just tire yourself out.”
21. Book a Massage
Schedule 1 for 24 hours within running to lend a hand flush muscle tissues and repair the hurt you’ve carried out. Plus, it feels quite damn just right.
22. Shake It Out
“The standout stat here is that, among marathon runners, 70 percent of sub-3:00 finishers go for an easy run the day before the race. This supports the value of the shakeout run—that is, an easy jog the day before your event. The idea is that you ‘shake out’ prerace nerves and keep your muscles loose. The numbers indicate that this practice is more common among faster runners—perhaps because slower counterparts are less experienced and more worried about detracting from their race-day performance. As the data reveals, they shouldn’t be: The whole point of a shakeout is that it should be short and very easy. Done right, it won’t be detrimental, and it might actually make you run better.”
23. Pack Your Bag Ahead of Time
Don’t go away one thing to chance at the morning of the race as you rush out the door in crack of dawn’s darkness. “This kit is where function meets superstition—both equally important for endurance athletes—and where you stash everything you’ll need before the start and after the finish.”
24. Skip the Spaghetti
Or on the very least the double serving at the night time time previous than the race. “Your body can’t process and store energy from additional food. Most of these calories will just be eliminated, and those that aren’t will just expand your waistline, not your energy stores. Instead, eat a regular-size meal rich in complex carbs, protein, and healthy fats, such as pasta with garlic sauce or a salmon fillet.”
25. Have Your Head on a Swivel
Sure, it’s going to let you dodge shut via runners and water cups long gone wild, alternatively it’s going to moreover drive you to take in what it’s that you simply’re doing whilst you race. “It’s the fact that you’re running through one of the most spectacular urban landscapes on earth. I was counting as I was running up Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn: That’s a seven-lane street that’s entirely empty except for runners. When you’re out there on a car-free street, it’s like nothing else. It’s a special experience. And crossing the bridges, too. When you’re out in the middle, you look at the scenery, and it really takes your breath away.”
26. Enjoy Each Race Like It’s Your Last
“Boston was my only real race goal from last year to this year. When you start to have only one big goal in a year, it starts to feel like a long time to stretch, and you realize you don’t have that many years left to do it.”
Source: fitnesscaster.com
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