When training to run a marathon it is important to space out your workout runs. Here are some tips on run scheduling in this fitness video.
Weekly long run is key
Day of active rest before, one of active recovery after
Time your eating
Time your recoveries
Dave has been an endurance athlete for over twenty years and is a swimmer , runner and cyclist that has finished the Iron Man triathlon. Additionally he has represented the US at the world championship. He coaches in Newport and has seen his team win the district title. He has a great passion for racing, training and coaching.
DAVE CAMPBELL: I'm Dave Campbell. I'm going to be talking about how to schedule marathon training. The key element in marathon training is the weekly long run which you build throughout your training as you progress towards your goal of completing a marathon. And this training should be done when you're rested when you have a good block of time available to you; so likely, it's going to be on a Saturday or a Sunday. It needs to be preceded by a day of total rest or active rest. And following that long run, you'll need to do a day of active recovery. And so, likely, that would be some easy swimming or cycling to encourage circulation, to alleviate soreness and help you actively recover. The weekly long run can be rotated with a 10 X 1 mile repeat run and those one-mile repeats are done at 10 to 20 seconds faster than goal-race pace with a couple of minutes of easy jogging in between. When scheduling your marathon training, the key things to think about are timing of eating and your recovery and your freshness, so that long run should ideally be done probably three hours after a meal. That's an excellent time to experiment with what kind of foods work well for you. As the week progresses, then after that weekly long run, you want to make sure before you do any other hard training sessions that you've recovered adequately. Schedule your training around family and work activities so that for the key hard workouts which would probably be Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Tuesday, you could do a tempo run with 10 to 60 minutes of work at 10-mile or half-marathon pace. And then Thursday, a threshold run with shorter efforts that are at a higher pace. Those need to be done when you're fresh. So perhaps, for the busy working person, that would happen in the morning before the stress of the day. The other day is with cross-training or easier running. It could be a good way to unwind at the end of a working day. But also take into account your ability to take in nutrition and having a time window that allows you to digest your food before you can do those runs.
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