My Marathon Training Part 2: Macro Plan and Principles

Planning to run a marathon is not so complicated but it needs to follow a few principles.

Photo by Fynn schmidt on Unsplash

The pyramid

The first principle is to divide the training plan into periods and building blocks.

These blocks are like the stones of a pyramid. The top of the pyramid is the marathon and we start building it from the bottom up, at the base.

The bird’s eye view of the entire training plan from the very first one to the actual running of the marathon and the period after the race is called the Macro-Plan. It gives the big picture.

The Macro-Plan is built up out of 4 phases or periods. Each of those periods or phases can be further detailed by a process called Meso-planning.

When digging even further and detailing the building blocks of each period or phase we are doing micro-planning.

So the microplan details the building blocks of each phase which is described by the mesoplan and the macroplan shows the entire pyramid so to say.

There are 4 big periods in a marathon training plan.

1. Endurance or Base training: the base of the pyramid which needs to be wide and strong. In this phase we build the basic aerobic capacity and muscle and tendon strength needed to take on the marathon and more specific training. This period will take about 20 weeks and is the biggest phase. It is building the engine. Some impulses of speed are sporadically allowed.
2. Intensity or Build phase: This involves more speedwork, lactate treshold work, intervals. This training is of higher intensity and can only be consistently introduced after the base training is completed. This phase takes about 8 weeks.
3. Marathon phase: This phase is typically 4 weeks before the marathon and involves 2 weeks of very high volume with some intensity, after which 2 weeks of reduced training is introduced, also called the taper, to let the body recover and get fueled before the big day.
4. Recovery phase: After the joy of finishing the marathon, the goal is not to go lie on the coach but to stay active and let the body recover while being active. This can take as long as you like and can flow into a new Base for a new goal or end with a complete period being off.

The period from Base to Marathon in my case is 32 weeks, which is more than enough to get ready. The marathon I had in mind is happening on 22 or 29th of september so depending which one I will take, the base training is shortened by 1 week.

3 to 1

Another big principle to follow is not to train by continuosly increasing volume or intensity. Recovery is an important part of getting stronger.

I will be dividing each training phase into (meso) blocks of 4 weeks. Those 4 week blocks each follow the same rhytm: 3 weeks increasing volume and/or intensity and 1 week active recovery. The 1 week recovery needs to be a significant reduction of training load. Each block of 4 weeks then increases in workload compared to the previous one. The increase will not be more than 10%.

That is how I end up with 5 mesoblocks in the Base training, 2 mesoblocks in Build and 1 in the marathonphase. The recoveryweek before jumping into a new phase needs to be a big reduction in trainingload.

In the next article I will be going into detail on the week to week planning and showing the plan for the first block of base training.

Today’s training: 20 min easy treadmill and core exercises.