Marathon Training Advice from Eamonn Dorling

Most people that train for a marathon fall into one of the following groups:

·         To get round

·         To improve on a predicted time

·         Elite athlete

The following information is designed to help the first two groups in the main, elite training needs to be personally drawn up after extensive time getting to know the athlete, existing strengths and weaknesses together with individual monitoring – so we’ll park that for the time being.

 Surviving the Marathon:

 Establishing ‘Where we are Now’

 Typically this would be a first time attempt or for someone that did not manage to finish on a previous occasion. It is important to respect the distance, take training seriously but not become a slave to the enterprise.  

World best times for 26 miles 385 yards are just a few minutes over 2 hours. When Haile Gebrselassie ran 2.03.59 in 2008 he averaged 4 minutes 45 seconds for each mile! Most of us cannot run a single mile at that pace. On the other hand a 4 hour time works out a little over 9 minutes per mile – a speed that many people find is achievable fairly soon after commencing training.  

So the first thing is to set an objective for the event, even if it is modified in the light of experience either faster or slower. For those who have absolutely no idea how fast they can run a simple experiment might be to run/jog round a route of around 3 miles (5km) at a pace that you can hold a conversation at. Use a digital watch (or mobile phone) to record your time and work out your pace. It is usual to judge pace in terms of minutes per mile or kilometre, so in the above example just divide the time taken by 3 (or 5 if you are into kilometres – remember that there are 42.2 of those in a marathon)  

Now that you have your pace ‘pre training’ multiply it by 26.2 for those dealing in miles to give you a starting point. Later on that objective will be modified to reflect progress from training – but at least we now know which group you should start training with. There is no benefit from joining a group that is too fast and a slow group will waste your valuable training time.

PREPARATION