So you want to run a marathon 3? Planning

January 16, 2013

Newbie guide to running a marathon part three! Planning Newbie guide to running a marathon part three! Planning

Before we get into the planning of our race, I want you to be clear what is expected of you. For example you should be running already, no matter what the pace, you need to be running consistently before you consider starting marathon training. Since we have decided to do the Cork City marathon next year in June and most marathon training plans are 6-8 months long, you have plenty of time to build up a regular diet of running. Apart from talking to your medical professional about running a marathon and getting a check-up, you should have been running for at least two or three years. If you haven’t I would suggest that you concentrate on the faster shorter distances and this will stand to you when you opt to run a marathon. If you have this base now is the time to run four or five days a week and prepare the body for what is to come. If you haven’t got this base then be advised there are consequences to pushing your body without transitioning to the marathon by apprenticing with 10km and half marathon races. This does not mean you can’t run a marathon but having done quite a number of marathons myself, I would advise you to build your base and increase your speed before committing to a marathon.

Have your gait checked if you are new to running distance and make sure the running shoes you have are ideal for you and your biomechanics. I don’t wish to delve into the whole barefoot versus purpose built running shoes but if you change your style of footwear then, no matter what mileage you’re at, you need to adapt to the new muscle stimulus. Ease into training.

So now that we are injury free, with a solid gait and a fully prepared body which is used to running we can proceed with planning our training.

Planning you training

To plan your training you need to work backwards from your chosen race and figure out how many weeks you have to train. This will help you chose or develop you own training plan. It is worth having a training plan that is broken down week by week, this is basic periodisation. Your weekly plan is broken down into sessions and the different intensities. And your weeks are built in blocks of a month or more. Periodisation is relatively easy to understand if you take the time to and it make a big difference to your training and mentally it breaks a long training period in to bite sized chunks.

So how do you design your own periodised marathon training plan? If you’re not following a professional plan or you don’t have a coaching organising your training you end up writing your own training regime. So hopefully the following will help you design your own ‘flexible’ plan. No plan survives contact with the enemy, so while you need to have a plan, you also need to realise that some weeks you will be sick or stressed or house bound, and then you need to readjust, not pack two weeks into one and get injured.

The biggest period or overview of your plan is called a macrocycle. While cycles can be of any duration within reason, the macrocycle is generally the annual or six month period. You can start with your off season or the plan commences at the end of the off season and the start of your generalised training. It depends on what you’re used to. Depending on how much training you need you will progress to more generalised training with a different short term goal or move on to specialised training. From there the plan will taper and then the marathon, after which the macrocycle can end with the recovery from the marathon cycle. And before you ask, yes you need to plan your recovery as much as you plan the training. What time of year you’re starting your plan will have a large bearing on your actual training plan as winter training months have advantages and disadvantages compared to summer months. The various phases or cycles of the macrocycle are called mesocycles (recovery / general / specialised etc.). For example the generalised mesocycle would focus on conditioning the aerobic base by starting running and building the long slow distance up. Some other examples of mesocycles would be off season, hill running, power, high intensity or sprinting / speed work.

A typical single marathon race macrocycle might look like this;

Preparation
Base Building
Build / special preparation
Peak / pre competitive
Taper/Race or competitive
Recovery or transition to next training cycle.

Each of these mesocycles will be broken up into microcycles. Microcycles are usually a week to ten days in duration. The microcycle is the actual sessions laid out session by session (or unit by unit) within the aims of the mesocycle.

A peaking mesocycle might look like this;

Monday: Short easy-paced run
Tuesday: Interval training
Wednesday: Rest day
Thursday: Time trial
Friday: Rest day
Saturday: medium distance run
Sunday: Long slow run

A major concern when planning your onslaught on the marathon is how much time can you actually train? How many times in the week and for how long? When can you train and where are you going to train? You will start with low volume and a minimum amount if times a week, that early before work is an option. But you need to be clear that in the big volume weeks and as the long runs increase that home and work life could be affected. If you have a stressful (or even if you don’t) home life it might be worth discussing your goals early with your partner and preparing them for the big mileage weeks in advance. Support from home makes the marathon so much easier and less of a chore.

So how is our plan for the 2013 Cork city marathon shaping up? Well we may or may not have recovered from the 2012 Cork city marathon for the month of June, recovery mesocycle and be into our off season mesocycle for the month of July. Working back from June 2013 your taper mesocycle will be the month of May (2-3 weeks), your peak or overload mesocycle will be the month of April with your build up for the months of February and March. Your aerobic base having being built before February. All these are rough estimates and depend on the plan you are following and how your coach modifies your plan depending on your progress. Each of the cycles gives you a focus and within these mesocycles you will have goals of differing nature.

So now we are down to the microcycle or the actual week by week plan with all the actual sessions laid out. If you’re designing your own training microcycle, I find the F.I.T.T. principle very useful for giving you a format to work off. FITT stands for;

Frequency: how often in the microcycle you are going to run (or other sessions)
Intensity: how hard you plan to train, be it speed-work or Long slow distance (LSD). Target heart rate zone or speed range etc.
Time: the duration of the session.
Type of training: Aerobic or anaerobic etc.

What is covered not so well in the FITT principle is training load which to me means volume X intensity. In marathon training, unlike track racing, the intensity is usually not overwhelming and we tend to focus more on the volume or distance run. But when a coach uses the words training volume he generally takes account of the intensity also. Volume is very running specific and can be measured in miles, kilometres or even hours (with intensity being factored in). 10 reps of the 400 metre track at faster than race pace is only 4km but the intensity at which you ran it, makes it a high training load despite the volume being only 4km. This is important to monitor as you don’t wish to increase your mileage too quickly.

Increasing your mileage too quickly could lead to overuse injuries and overtraining issues. A general rule touted in the running press is don’t increase your volume by more than 10% per week. While there are too many factors related to this and no one study has come out with a definitive figure, I believe in the initial stages of a novice marathon runner’s plan this ‘guideline’ is worth sticking to. The 10% rule has been around for seems like forever without any real science to back it up but the main ideal here is not to rush the mileage increases. Later in regards to overtraining (a whole other article) we will discuss what I like to call, unload weeks. That is every four to six weeks or microcycles that you reduce the volume or intensity or both to allow the body and your mental faculties to recover.

So you will increase your training using some part of the FITT & Load (which we will call FITT-L) principle for approximately three weeks and then the fourth week, depending on the plan, we will reduce the intensity and or the volume for what is in effect a recovery week in which you will maintain training. This is easily done by reducing the overall mileage by 25-35% and reducing the intensity. If your following a heart rate training plan then you will need to consider which heart rate zone you need to use for the unload / recovery week. Just remember that your training load is governed by both your volume (a major factor in marathon training) AND intensity. The below table should give you a very basic idea how the training load is affected in the various mesocycles or training phases.

Phase: Preparation Specific Preparation Pre- Competition Competition

Intensity: Low Low Medium High

Volume: High High Medium Low

Recovery: Low Low Medium High

So what kind of training sessions make up the microcycle? Well that depends on the plan you are following. Most novice runners take a plan from the internet and try to follow it religiously. I find that these pre-packaged or sometimes called cookie cutter plans are written conservatively. Also it is very hard to follow a plan if life gets in the way; this is why many people opt for a coach for their first marathon. Even an informal coach or what I like to call an experienced "adviser" is worth their weight in gold for explaining the deviations the life requires. They can also reassure you when times are tough, that you’re on the right track. A coach is not a teacher; the marathon teacher has written the plan and left it to you to learn the wisdom. Be it from a book, magazine or internet site. A coach is someone you deals in communication and helps you to grow and learn your own way. Some of the best coaches are found in athletics clubs, especially on wet and cold winter’s evenings. Or hire a coach! Also an option in our fast paced modern lives.

Trying to write specific running sessions for your marathon would be very difficult to do across the world wide web, so instead I am going to explain some of the terms that you might find out there, on your plan or in the internet in general;

Rest: funny enough the most misunderstood term out there, rest is simply rest, not badminton or cricket or even a six hour power shop, it just means rest. Usually so your body can recover after a hard training day.
Active rest: sometimes called recovery, and always low intensity. Could be following a long run or race. These recovery runs are usually at a slow and steady pace.
Long run: Sometimes referred to as Long Slow Distance or LSD. A run that increases your basic level of endurance. A long run this month could be five miles and in six month 20 miles. Usually builds the aerobic base and is done at conversational pace. Helps the body utilise oxygen more effectively.
Fartlek: it means speed play. You run a short to medium length run at your natural pace adding in short speed intervals of varying length and speed. It is a gentle speed session which not only prepares you for intense speed work but increases your running efficiency and fatigue resistance.
Hill repetitions: short bouts of hard uphill running with a walk back down for the recovery. Ideally on a 4-6% gradient with anything from 30 seconds to 90 seconds running time. Builds running specific strength as well as fatigue resistance, not to mention pain tolerance and mental strength.
Tempo runs: are runs that have a sustained effort at lactate threshold. They are sometimes called anaerobic threshold runs. These runs increase your speed and lactate tolerance. Think of them as prolonged speed runs.
Intervals: or speed work, are repeated sprints (or high intensity paces) for short or long intervals, everything from 50 metres to Yasso 800’s to mile repeats (Bart Yasso of runners world in the states.
Threshold runs are performed at the intensity corresponding to your acidosis (lactate) threshold. The fastest speed that you can sustain aerobically at a speed that is just on the transition point to using the anaerobic metabolism.

So those are some of the running sessions that will make up your microcycles, it is important to know if you’re following a plan without a coach because at some stage we all focus on the distance and not the pace we are supposed to be running in training.

A frequent problem discussed amongst coaches is how their athlete’s run their slow sessions too fast and their fast sessions too slow. Concentrate on your session and focus on the goal of that session instead of falling in to a rut and running the same pace every day. A performance coach once told me that training really slow, trains you to run really slow. Don’t be afraid of speed work; use it to your advantage.

As usual these are my thoughts and if you wish to add to them feel free. I hope this has given you food for thought, and if it has, great! This is advice and doesn’t replace a proper coach and an individualised training plan. This was a long article and I promise the next one will be shorter, honest!

Niall 15/01/2013