MARATHON TRAINING PROGRAM

BEGINNER'S PROGRAM

    If you are a novice and have completed all the training necessary to run a half­ marathon-for example, you have followed an introductory program from chapter 5 or 9-you should be ready to start training for a marathon, should you so wish. Again, it is necessary to emphasize that if you started as a complete novice with no recent running experience, you should have undergone at least 25 weeks of training. If you start on the next phase of this program without an adequate base of 25 weeks of training, you will be at greater risk of injury once you start running more intensively with less rest between long runs.
    Table 10.1 presents the program that I suggest as the natural extension of Grete Waitz's program for beginners (table 5.9). The program in table 10.1 ensures that the runner who is training for 160 minutes per week and who has successfully completed a 10-km race will be able to complete a standard marathon in a further 26 weeks. It is a slight modification of the one used successfully in 1983 to train 26 novices to complete a marathon within 36 weeks of their first 20-minute walk.

    The key to the program is the gentle extension in daily training volumes, with special emphasis on long runs that, in line with the method used by Mark Allen (see chapter 6), increase in a gradual stepwise progression by 10 minutes every second week. Note that this program includes both times and distances. The times are calculated for those running 6 minutes per km or slower, the distances for those who run faster. Neither the listed distances nor the times should be exceeded.
    This program is clearly for those runners wishing to complete a marathon comfortably with a low risk of injury and with the highest possible probability of success. It does not include speed or hill training that, if done properly, will undoubtedly improve race time substantially. Other programs, like those of Jeff Galloway included later in this chapter, incorporate this type of training.
    Many programs advise on the exact mileage that runners should cover when training for a marathon. This begs the question of what science tells us about the optimum training distances for marathon runners. In fact, there are few studies of the actual distances people run in training for a marathon. Thus, we do not really know what the optimum training distance is for the majority of novice marathon runners. The distances advocated in this program have been arrived at empirically, but they are compatible with the findings of a study by Grant et al. (1984). When evaluating the training patterns of 88 runners in the 1982 Glasgow Mara­ thon, Grant and colleagues found that the average distance run in training was 60 km per week for the 12 weeks before the race and ranged from 24 to 103 km. This study also debunked two important myths. First, there is no relationship between weekly training distance and marathon time (as shown by Franklin et al. 1978). Second, despite their apparent inadequate training, the runners did not slow down dramatically after hitting their predicted collapse point at about 27 km.
    Thus, they could find no evidence to support the collapse-point theory proposed by Ken Young (1978). This theory holds that runners who do not train more than 101 km per week collapse and are reduced to a shuffle when they race more than three times their average daily training distance for the last eight weeks before the marathon. Finally, as in the study of Franklin et al. (1978), these novice marathoners were unable to predict their marathon times accurately. However, the accuracy of their predictions did improve the closer they were made to race day.

TIM NOAKES' ADVANCED PROGRAM

    During my marathon running career, I achieved personal best times of 2:50:20 (42 km), 3:59:49 (56 km), and 6:49:00 (90 km). I achieved these times on the training programs described here. I present them as an option for those with a similar physiology and training capacity. A measure of my physiological capacity were my best times for certified courses of 1:00:59 for 16 km (3:48 per km) and 1:21:39 for 21 km (3:52 per km).
    My personal training approach was similar to Newton's. It included plenty of long, slow distance to the exclusion of speed work. This was because I originally switched to running (from rowing) with the express intention of completing the Comrades Marathon, regardless of finishing time. For the first six to eight years of my running career, I trained exclusively by running long, slow distances. However, I now firmly believe that this training approach, which emphasizes distance training to the virtual exclusion of speed work, although very safe, is not the best way to train for any distance, including ultramarathons. I endorse Roger Bannister's view that high-mileage distance training increases the athlete's speed of recovery from effort but does not increase racing speed. The athlete must achieve a balance by doing just the right amount of speed training.
    Thus, the evidence is that the fastest middle-distance and cross-country runners are the best runners at all distances, even up to the very long ultramarathons (see chapter 6). However, there is one important proviso-they need to have superior fatigue resistance. But superior fatigue resistance alone will not make a world-class marathon or ultramarathon runner. For that, both speed and fatigue resistance are required, as shown by the comparison of the running performances of Sebastian Coe, Daniel Komen, and Haile Gebrselassie.
    With this background, I include details of the training practices I followed when running marathon races on a regular basis between the ages of 22 and 36. After that, I found that I could no longer train as hard as the program required. However, with the aim of addressing more mature runners, I have included some ideas on how to modify training with advancing age.
 

Modifying Training for Age

    George Sheehan once said that you should never write a book on training and racing for runners. As soon as you did, it would signal that you were a has­ been. In my case, he was quite correct. After completing the first edition of this book in 1985, I never again ran a decent race.
    Of course, I would suggest that the two events were not causally linked. My desire to write the book coincided with my growing perception that I had learned as much as I possibly could from the physical acts of training and racing. I perceived that from then on, my focus should rather become an intellectual one that distilled that practical experience with the growing body of scientific knowledge on running and the physiology of the body. But I also suspect that these intellectual justifications occurred at a time when I first began to notice that running was becoming less easy, partly because of age and partly because of the effects of 15 years of heavy training and frequent racing.
    The point is that both increasing age and years of heavy training reduce the amount of training that you can do. This is shown somewhat dramatically in the lifetime running experience of Basil Davis (see figure 2.19). After age 45, Davis' ability to train fell precipitously, despite his continuing conscious desire to train and race at a high level.
    The training programs presented in this book were all designed for men and women in the prime of their athletic careers. The problem is that we do not know how they should be modified for older athletes, since few have written on this topic. Runners, you see, are never meant to age or to become so frail that they are unable to train as hard as did the world-class athletes in their prime.
    The best advice I can give is that if you are over 45 or if you have been competing for more than 15 to 20 years, you should not try to train according to the guidelines given in the training tables in this and other chapters. Rather, you should aim to achieve a certain percentage of what is written, say 60% to 75%. As you learn more about your body's abilities, you can modify that percentage accordingly. Remember always to follow the 6th Law of Training (At first, try to achieve as much as possible on a minimum of training).
    A general rule is that older runners perform better on less training since the margin between optimum training and overtraining (see chapter 7) is much less, which makes it easier to overstress the older body and to perform poorly as a result. The runners at greatest risk are those who have always run and who were once competitive. It takes great insight and wisdom to realize that the glory days are past and that a new perspective must be reached.

    The initial goal of my hard training program (table 10.2) was to condition myself to be able to run 110 km per week, a distance that I have also found to be optimal for the majority of recreational runners who have major time constraints.

Increasing Volume

    For the first 10 weeks or so of my more intensive training program, I would gradually increase my training from 90 to 110 km per week. At first, my average training speed would be slower than 5:00 per km, I would struggle up each and every hill, and the longer runs would be particularly tiring. I judged the stress of these runs not only by how I felt during each run, but also by how quickly I recovered after the run. A run that had been too long or too hard would make me want to sleep for an hour or two; I would be unable to do any mental work that day, and the following day I would run tired. A run that had been just the right length would leave me a little tired, and I would need to sleep for only a short time, after which I would be able to do an hour or two of mental work, should I so choose. By the following day's run, my body would have recovered sufficiently to ensure that my gentle recovery run of between 6 and 14 km would be effortless. During this phase, I would run three to five short races of up to 16 km. Any longer races that I might enter would constitute long training runs.
    This break-in phase lasted for 10 to 12 weeks, during which time my long week­ end runs would not be less than 24 km and not longer than 32 km. The major indications that this phase had had its desired effect were that I started to finish the long runs so fresh that I wanted to run farther on the following long run. At the same time, my average training speed increased, and the hills that I ran became much easier. When this happened, I was ready to move on to the second phase of my program, the so-called peaking phase.
    Most of this training was done to and from work over a hilly terrain. During my Tuesday and Thursday afternoon runs, I would sometimes include slightly faster runs, either track or hill repetitions.
    Interestingly, studies have been unable to show that training more than 120 km per week produces any additional physiological benefits for competitive racers (Sjodin and Svedenhag 1985). This weekly distance is used by the middle-distance athletes trained by Bill Bowerman and is also advocated by Herb Elliott (Lenton 1981). This is about half the distance I would normally run when not training hard. An important reason I did not run farther in training is that if I started increasing my mileage, say up to 160 km per week, I began to feel that I was doing nothing but running. I imagine that I felt much the same as Ron Daws did while training for the 1968 Olympic Marathon in the dark mornings and evenings of a Minnesota winter (Daws 1977). He wrote that there were times when he returned from his runs not knowing whether he should be going to bed or getting ready for a day's work. Once I reached that state, I was no longer able to maintain my interest in running. I had approached the point Mark Allen wrote about in the early years of his training for the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon (see chapter 6). He was prepared to do only as much as he considered necessary to win the race, whereas he later learned that the race required more. Only when he trained as much as he now thought the race required did he start to win. I never crossed that divide between being aver­ age and achieving something better. Perhaps I had come to accept that on account of my physiology, it was not worth the effort.
    In addition, I discovered that heavy training not only affected my creativity, but it also interfered with other commitments, inducing other adverse stresses such as inadequate sleep, excessive fatigue, family displeasure, and missed deadlines. While gentle running enhances a person's productivity and creativity, too much training has the opposite effect. Arthur Newton recognized this, for he states: Aggressively serious physical effort left me with a positive disinclination to study anything that needed real brain work. So much of my available energy was used for training that only a mere trickle was left over for recreational purposes, not nearly enough to permit me to delve into metaphysics or similar intricate matters which always beckoned me. I regretted it all the time, for / felt / was losing a great deal in the way of education, yet to neglect even a small part of my training might make all the difference between reasonable certainty and chance, and / dislike the latter. (Newton 1947a, page 66).
    I suspect that the biochemical explanation for this is that heavy training causes depletion of certain brain chemicals, the reduction of which also explains the relaxing and tranquilizing effect of running and, in the long term, the overtraining syndrome. This effect also explains why serious runners cannot hold down jobs that demand excessive mental effort, particularly in the afternoons and especially during periods of intensive training. Training burns up creative energy, leaving little space for other intellectual matters.
    The converse also applies. While engrossed in writing this book-a task many times more demanding than preparing for the Comrades Marathon-I sometimes found it difficult to run regularly and for any reasonable duration. The creative energy needed to coax me outdoors had been expended in the compilation of these pages.
    Indeed, if there is one contentious issue in training for distance running, it is the exact value of running many miles at these low exercise intensities. That the majority of runners spend most of their time training at quite low exercise intensities has been shown by a number of studies. For example, a study of 13 elite New Zealand distance runners (D. M. Robinson et al. 1991) found that their average training intensity was characterized by the following: their average heart rate was 145 beats per minute; their average percentage VO2max was 64%; and their average running speed was 15.6 km per hour, which corresponds to 77% of the speed at which the lactate turnpoint occurred. Remarkably, only 4% of their training involved running at speeds greater than that at which the lactate turn point occurred.
    Another study found that the average training pace of a group of top German female marathoners corresponded to only 60% ~max, or less than 77% of the running speed at which their blood lactate concentrations reached 4 mmol per liter.
    Similarly, Gilman and Wells (1993) found that most of the training of a group of women of average ability training for an 8-km race was at an easy or moderate intensity, with very little training (Less than 9%) at a hard intensity. In contrast, 70% of the 8-km race was run at heart rates equivalent to 96% of maximum. The authors also concluded that the runners had overestimated the volume of high­ intensity training they performed and that they would have benefited from the use of heart rate monitors.
    Our own more recent studies (Mbambo 1999) showed that, whereas heart rates were in excess of 170 beats per minute for 62% of their racing time, a group of 10 long-distance runners training under a coach ran at those heart rates for only 10% of their training time when doing long, slow distance and for only 25% of that time when doing high-intensity training (figure 10.2). In that study, the average duration of the races and the long, slow distance (LSD) and high-intensity training (HIT) sessions were similar (about 40 to 60 minutes). Hence, to accumulate the same total number of heart beats at rates faster than 170 beats per minute, athletes would need to run about three high-intensity training sessions for each 10- to 15-km race that they ran. Mbambo (1999) also showed that during races heart rates were al­ ways higher than predicted from measurements made at the same running speed during training, and that running in the heat predictably elevated the heart rate.

    In chapter 2, I discuss recent studies that suggest that cutting out much of this slow training, but retaining the speed training, does not impair performance, at least over shorter distances of S to 10 km. However, I am not yet ready to conclude that all low-intensity training is unnecessary. Certainly, provided the total training volume is less than 110 km per week, this low-intensity training would not seem detrimental. But its value for running performances, certainly over the shorter distances, has not yet been proven. Recall also the evidence in chapter 6 showing how well many elite runners have performed on relatively little training. The major benefits of heavy training volumes in excess of 120 km per week are to increase the strength of the connective tissue in the muscles and the resistance to the eccentric muscle damage that produces fatigue after running 30 or more kilometers, which then increases your ability to keep running beyond the marathon wall.

Peaking

    The aim of peaking is to increase the training load further by adding speed training sessions, in the form of either intervals, speed play (fartlek), time-trials, or short­ distance races (5 to 16 km) for a period of four to six weeks before competitions. As described in chapter 5, this form of training produces dramatic changes in racing speed. But if maintained for too long, it can induce early symptoms of overtraining (chapter 7). Thus, it is a high-risk/high-reward period of your training.
    The next phase of my 20-week hard training cycle differed, depending on the length of the race for which I was preparing. For shorter distances, I emphasized mostly speed training and maintained the weekly training distance at about 120 km per week. For ultramarathon, I emphasized distance training and long weekend runs, only adding speed training when I had completed the heavy distance training.
    During the peaking phase (table 10.3), I would emphasize speed training sessions, either on a Tuesday or a Thursday, and would run two or three races of 10 to 16 km (but no farther). I found that these are the optimum racing distances for preparing for both the 10-km race and the marathon. Longer races tend to cause more severe muscle damage from which recovery is slow. Also, from a psychological viewpoint, the marathon breaks up neatly into two 16-km races and one 10-km race. Thus, during the marathon race, I would concentrate on running as close to my best times for each of these distances as was possible. When properly prepared, it is remark­ able how close you can come to this goal. More general ideas on speed training are included in chapter 5.

    During the second-last week before the marathon, I would reduce my training to between 50 and 80 km of easy running and would rest and carbohydrate load for the last three days before the race. During the intervening four days, I would incorporate three days of mild carbohydrate restriction and runs of 12 to 18 km, depending on how I felt.
    The value of either procedure is not really known. Recall that carbohydrate restriction is not necessary to optimize carbohydrate storage during carbohydrate loading. Also, the ideal taper for marathon and ultramarathon runners has not yet been established in a scientific trial. The optimum taper for a short­ distance race (800 m to 5 kIn) might well be that described by Shepley et al. (1992) in which high-intensity interval training of decreasing volume is performed for the last five days before race day. For the long ultramarathon races (over 100 km), it may be better to continue heavy training right up to race day, as suggested by Cooper (1990).
    My bias is to believe that there should be more rest and less running during the tapering phase and certainly more days in which you do no training at all. In chapter 5, I refer to the Zatopek phenomenon, in which elite athletes have achieved remarkable performances after a period of reduced training-in the case of Zatopek, even after being hospitalized for two days before his record-breaking performances. Some 30 years since this phenomenon was first recognized, I realize that I ran one of my best 56-kIn ultramarathon races after a period of enforced rest. I ran the race a mere three weeks after undergoing surgery to my foot, which prevented me from running for two weeks. In the last week before the race, I had only been able to fit in a few jogs. Without trying, I ran a time that was less than 40 seconds slower than my best over the distance, achieved three years later after a much more intensive training program but during a race for which I did not taper properly. The last word on the ideal taper has yet to be written.

FROM: LORE OF RUNNING by Tim Noakes, MD