Marathon Training Needs Endurance
I saw another great question on Quora about marathon running which I thought needed to be broken apart a little further.
“If a person can run a 5K in less than 22 minutes, will he likely be able to run a marathon in less than 5 hours with his current fitness?”
Running a 5km run at this pace will highlight the fact the runner has a good base of fitness and health but should not be cutting corners in thinking a marathon will be easy to do without any real planning or extra training.
I remember the first marathon I trained for back in 2013. I’d been running for about 10 years and after thinking I would never really run much further than 5 or 10 kilometre races, for some reason the allure of the marathon became too much. I had done three half marathons already and was doing some triathlons so thought giving myself 12 weeks to train for a marathon was more than enough.
12 weeks of training was more than enough but I realised I needed to change my focus early on, when I did my second long run as part of my training. It was a 26km run and when I got about 24km into the run, I simply couldn’t run any more. I wasn’t out of breath, I made sure I had paced the run at an easy pace from the first kilometre. The simple fact was, my legs refused to keep running.
Even though I was running my 5km runs at about 19 minutes, and had a lot of fitness behind me, but I simply did not have muscular endurance or aerobic endurance to be running over two hours. Although, these are two basic components of physical fitness, I was lacking in both.
I was heavily reliant on carbohydrates and I was not actually fueling through my training run. To turn this around in the coming weeks I made sure of two things in my training.
1. I started feeding during my run.
I didn’t have much experience with nutrition and didn’t want to overcomplicate things so decided gels and bars were not going to work for me. I decided I would take a handful of jelly snakes with me on my long run and pop one in my mouth after the first 5kms of my long run. I would just suck on it, so I didn’t need to worry about drinking enough water after fueling. Water was important but I was relying on drinking taps around my running route, so didn’t want to get caught out by a faulty tap stopping me from fueling. I also knew that keeping it simple I would be able to do exactly the same thing on race day and I had still another eight weeks to iron out any issues.
2. I persevered with my long runs
It was disheartening having to walk home at the end of that long run and I knew jelly snakes weren’t a magic bullet. Even though I was fit, I needed to improve my aerobic and muscular endurance. My body, specifically my heart and lungs were not used to delivering oxygen to my muscles for such a long amount of time. As well, a long run will also help your body learn to convert fats into fuel for your body. The long run also helped my confidence knowing that I was able to correct things and keep running longer and longer.
There is an alternative
I’m not going to tell people I’m an expert in the field but need to mention there is growing research and anecdotal evidence that HIIT based and weights based training can go a long way in improving muscular endurance to allow you to run a marathon without needing to encorporating long runs but you do need get comfortable with lifting weights.
Running a marathon puts your body in a completely different state which is difficult to simulate without putting extra stress on your body in training. Without developing some endurance before hand, it could result in a lot of walking on race day and possibly walking past your five hour goal.
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Vince Sesto is a DevOps Engineer, Endurance Athlete, Coach and Author. One of his passion’s in life is endurance sports as both an athlete, coach and author. He is a certified running and triathlon coach with a goal to inspire people through his coaching and competition and to encourage people to live active and healthy lives.
His motto in life is, “I am trying to change the world, one run at a time”.
