David,

This season I’m doing my first marathon, first olympic tri, and first ironman. I am super stoked to get to do these workouts! I really love how organized your program is and I used your website to set up all my zones and stuff and it makes a ton of sense. I trained for the marathon blind and wish I would have found your program before I started it.

If you have any just basic tips I would love to hear them if you have time. Thank you again for taking the time to help me out with this!

Thanks,

K

Dear K,

I’ll give you my top six training tips (that I can think of at this particular moment…)

1- Adherence to the plan is important, but missing workouts should not cause anxiety. 90 percent adherence to the plan will get you 98 percent of the results.
2- Workouts done first thing in the morning have a significantly higher chance of actually getting done (100 years from now this statement will be as popular as Wayne Gretzky’s, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”)
3- Go hard on the hard days and easy on the easy days. This is fundamental to 80/20 training, and is integrated into your training plan.
4- Practice nutrition early, on any run workout longer than 1.5 hours and any bike/brick longer than 3 hours. Race-day nutrition should be nailed down for the last 4 weeks of your training.
5- Add strength training to your plan with our free strength training plugins (these will be published by this week-end, check the 80/20 website under Free Plans). If you have to replace some of the easy workouts with 1-2 sessions a week, you’ll actually get better results. Doing both the plan plus the strength training is best.
6- The biggest mistake that first time Marathon and IM athletes make is going out too fast. If you are tapered properly (which the 80/20 plans will do), you’ll feel like a caged tiger. Hold back and save it for the second half.

David