Running a Marathon For Dummies by Jason Karp

Author:Jason Karp
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-10-15T20:00:00+00:00

Intermediate runners are like the middle child: experienced enough to handle more work than a beginner, but not experienced enough to handle the responsibility of high-level training. As an intermediate runner, your marathon training program focuses on improving your aerobic capacity with more mileage, quality aerobic workouts, and some emphasis on interval training. If you’ve run a couple of marathons and a modest amount of mileage, this chapter is for you. Here, I give you a plan to run a better marathon.

Understanding and Using the Intermediate Runner’s Program

The emphasis of the intermediate program is on improving your aerobic endurance with a steady increase in weekly mileage and long runs. The 20-week program slowly increases mileage as you include quality aerobic running with tempo workouts (introduced in Chapter 5), followed by more intense interval workouts (see Chapter 7). The program emphasizes tempo training given the importance of your acidosis threshold (AT) for the marathon. (Turn to Chapter 5 for info on AT.) The program finishes with a three-week taper in mileage; the intensity is kept high in week 18 before the program drops in both mileage and intensity in weeks 19 and 20. (Flip to Chapter 14 for info on tapering.)

I also include races at the end of selected cycles, which you can use to test your progress and to readjust your training paces. If your race is on Saturday instead of Sunday, adjust the days of the week accordingly by moving everything up a day.

From a physiological perspective, I spend more time training runners with tempo workouts at AT pace than at marathon pace. Although running at marathon pace can give you confidence, you don’t derive much benefit from it other than to practice that pace, because marathon pace doesn’t correspond to any physiological variable that influences marathon performance. If you improve your AT speed, your marathon pace will get faster. For even the best marathon runners, AT pace is faster than marathon pace. So I usually come down on the side of targeting the physiology. If you want to practice marathon pace for the confidence it gives you for race day, you can substitute some of the longer tempo runs and tempo/LSD combo runs in the program with marathon pace runs.

Try to find a half-marathon about four weeks before the marathon (at the end of training cycle 4). Running a half-marathon gives you confidence and a good idea of the pace you can expect to run in the marathon.

As you follow the program, make your training polarized — that is, run hard on your hard days to provide stress and run easy on your easy days so you can truly recover. Note that hard running doesn’t always mean fast running, though. In marathon running, endurance always predominates, so hard running usually means increasing the volume of work you do at a specific pace (or decreasing the recovery interval). When designed this way, with both stress and recovery given equal attention and diligence, your training plan is an elegant system that works.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.