Marathon Training – 80/20 Endurance

You’ve probably heard of the book 80/20 Running, perhaps even read it. But did you know that the original working title of this book was A High-Mileage Manifesto? I started writing it in 2013, a time when HIIT mania was in full bloom, CrossFit Endurance was making waves, and Run Less, Run Faster was the top-selling training guide for runners. Dismayed by these and other influences, I decided to push back in the best way I knew. It was only when I realized that the average runner can’t benefit from running more until they’ve first balanced their training intensities correctly—shifting from the typical 50 percent moderate-intensity routine to the 80 percent low-intensity approach of the elite—did A High-Mileage Manifesto become 80/20 Running.

Despite this evolution, I remain convinced that exercising a lot is a proven best practice in endurance training that not enough athletes at the nonelite level actually practice. Scientific support for this position keeps coming. The latest evidence arrives in the form of a study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. Japanese researchers surveyed 587 runners (all male, unfortunately) about their training prior to their participation in the 2017 Hokkaido Marathon. Intensity data were not included in this particular study. The researchers were specifically interested in identifying links between various volume-related parameters and marathon performance—and they found them.

Among runners who trained with equal frequency, there were significant correlations between monthly training volume, average run distance, long run distance, and marathon time. In other words, given two runners who each trained five times per week, the one who packed more miles into these runs tended to perform better on race day. Interestingly, though, when the researchers compared runners at different levels of monthly volume, there were no correlations between training frequency, average run distance, long run distance, and marathon time. This suggests that monthly volume matters a lot, and how one achieves it matters less. But it does matter some, for when the researchers looked at runners who had the same average run distance or long run distance, strong correlations were found between these variables and monthly volume and marathon time.

On the basis of their findings, the researchers concluded, “These results indicate that monthly training volume is the most important factor in predicting marathon time and that the influence of monthly training volume is only significant if the running distance per workout exceeded a certain level.” The lesson I draw from this study as a coach is that, if you want to race a good marathon, you need to run high-mileage consistently. Get your volume up to a high but sustainable level and keep it there.

Perhaps I’ll get around to completing A High-Mileage Manifesto one day. For now, here’s the overview to a proposal I wrote for the book.

In 1945 Arthur Lydiard set out on a five-mile run that changed his life—and the sport of running—forever. The young track racer struggled to keep up with a much older man on that relatively short jaunt and came home humbled, realizing he was not nearly as fit as he’d thought he was. Sensing that the secret to running faster in races was to run farther in training, Lydiard gradually built his endurance to the point where he was able to easily run well over 100 miles every week, which was unheard of in those days. In 1953, Lydiard, now thirty-six years old, won the New Zealand Marathon Championship. Afterward he was inundated by requests for coaching from other runners.

At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, three athletes coached by Lydiard won medals (two of them gold). Suddenly the whole world was interested in Lydiard’s high-mileage training approach. Within a decade this approach had been adopted by virtually every elite runner on earth and was responsible for a drastic improvement in world records at all race distances between 800 meters and the marathon. Today the essence of Lydiard’s training system is still practiced almost universally by professional runners and by most collegiate runners and serious high school runners.

Curiously, however, the vast majority of runners who take up the sport as adults do not run high mileage and are not even aware that this training approach is regarded by every true expert as the necessary path to the full realization of any runner’s innate potential. Of course, the average recreational road racer with a full-time job and a family cannot be expected to run more than 100 miles per week as the professionals do. But it is bizarre that such runners are not even encouraged to run as much as they reasonably can. No other sport is bifurcated in this way, where competitive young athletes and recreational adult athletes are not even taught the same methods to improve.

The split occurred when the sport of running exploded in popularity in the 1990s and it has widened steadily since then. The rapid minting of new adult runners has created opportunities for new coaches to guide and train them. Almost without exception, the opportunists who specialize in mentoring adult recreational runners have little or no background in serious competitive running and were never indoctrinated into Lydiard’s high-mileage training approach. Knowing no better, these pseudo-experts base their own training systems not on high mileage but instead on “new” methods such as high-intensity intervals and technique fixing, which are not new at all but in fact were tried by past generations of elite runners and discarded as inferior.

This madness has to stop. Every runner deserves to know the best way to train. While high-mileage running may not be for everyone, the method that Lydiard perfected sixty years ago yields better results than any alternative even when scaled to fit the lifestyle of the average recreationally competitive adult runner. It’s a crime that this truth, known to all of the sport’s true experts, has been hidden from the masses by lesser authorities. A High-Mileage Manifesto is an overdue corrective that rediscovers the lost secret to running better and motivates runners who are not already enjoying its fruits to give it a try in the way that works best for them.

Written by Matt Fitzgerald, whose previous books include the bestselling Racing Weight and the award-winning Iron War, A High-Mileage Manifesto does not badger busy runners to run more than they really want to. Instead it makes Arthur Lydiard and his method the heroes of a story of triumph against long odds and of lasting survival in the face of wrongheaded challenges. In this way the book gently persuades readers to make their own choice to embrace high-mileage running, which truly can be tailored to work for any runner, as the meaning of “high mileage” is relative.

Like Fitzgerald’s past books, A High-Mileage Manifesto is intended above all to provide a captivating and satisfying reading experience for all runners who enjoy running enough to purchase a book on the subject. Readers will enjoy the author’s rich portrayal of Arthur Lydiard, history’s most iconic running coach, about whom far too little is known by most runners today. They will also gain a new perspective on the history of the sport as Fitzgerald traces the evolution of training methods from the nineteenth century to the Lydiard revolution to today. And they will have their minds blown by Fitzgerald’s limpid explanations of fascinating new science proving the superiority of high-mileage running in unexpected ways that almost no one yet knows about.

The book is organized as a linked set of narrative essays arranged in a loosely chronological order. Chapter 1 lays out the problem to be solved. The next several chapters take the reader on a journey of entertaining persuasion that follows the story of Lydiard’s great idea from its unlikely conception, through its astonishing world takeover and subsequent setbacks, to its ultimate vindication. The concluding chapter tells runners of all experience and ability levels everything they need to know to benefit from high-mileage running. By the time they get there readers will be keyed up beyond all expectations to do just that.

The era of big data has arrived in sports science research, and I couldn’t be happier. For a long time I was skeptical about sports science as a source of useful information about how to train effectively as an endurance athlete. The typical study was just too limited in scope and too simplified in comparison to the real world for me as a coach to put much stock in its findings. Even basic truths like the importance of training at high volume to maximize endurance fitness had virtually zero support in the scientific literature because it was almost impossible to prove or disprove within the constraints of a typical sports science study.

But the advent of big data has changed all that. Now scientists can answer specific training questions with a high degree of confidence by collecting training data from tens of thousands of athletes and teasing out correlations between training inputs and fitness and performance outputs.

The latest example is a study on tapering in marathon training that was conduction by Barry Smyth and Aonghus Lawlor at University College Dublin and published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. Smyth and Lawlor analyzed data from the devices of more than 158,000 runners in the final weeks of marathon training, focusing on 1) how long their taper period was (i.e., how many weeks out from race day their training volume began to decline), 2) how disciplined their taper was (i.e., how consistently their training volume decreased throughout it), and 3) how well they performed in the marathon relative to their best 10K time. Here are the main findings:

A more disciplined taper (i.e., consistent decline in volume) was the strongest predictor of better marathon performance. Once runners began to taper, they were better off continuing to taper.
Runners who tapered for three weeks tended to perform better than runners who tapered for two weeks or less. Extending the taper to four weeks resulted in no additional gains.
Runners who trained at higher volumes prior to tapering tended to taper longer and to execute more disciplined tapers.
A majority of the runners (64 percent) tapered for two weeks or less and in an undisciplined way.

The authors concluded, “An important practical implication of this work is that there could be an opportunity for many runners to improve their relative performance by implementing a more disciplined form of taper. This is likely to be of considerable interest to recreational marathoners and coaches.”

They’re certainly right on that last point. As a coach to many marathon runners, I take considerable interest in these findings. But I’m not exactly sure yet what to do with them. I’ve always believed that the duration of a taper should be determined by how hard the athlete trains before the taper, and that most recreational runners don’t train hard enough to require a long taper. In this study, appropriately, high-volume runners were found to have engaged in the longest tapers, but even lower-volume runners tended to gain a slight benefit from a three-week taper versus a shorter one. The impact of a disciplined taper was greater than that of a lengthier taper, however, and like any coach with half a brain I always prescribe disciplined tapers, so that won’t change.

Come to think of it, I don’t know if anything will change. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single athlete I’ve ever coached who underperformed in a marathon as a consequence of feeling under-tapered going into the race. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. On the other hand, my curiosity is piqued, so I will probably give one of my athletes an opportunity to experiment with a slightly longer marathon taper in the near future. If it doesn’t work, we can both blame Barry Smyth and Aonghus Lawlor.

As a final note, although this study focused on marathon tapering, its most striking finding had to do with marathon pacing. Specifically, female runners were found to pace their marathons far more skillfully than male runners, who on average added 4.49 minutes to their finish times by starting too aggressively and hitting the wall. For me, this finding points to the need for a comprehensive guide to developing pacing skill. Stay tuned.

On May 5, 2019, Stephanie Bruce won the USATF Half Marathon Championship by 21 seconds with a time of 1:10:43. The following day, she asked her coach, Ben Rosario, for permission to compete in a 5000-meter track race on May 16^th. Ben gave her his blessing, and 10 days later Steph set a new personal best and an NAZ Elite team record (since broken) for 5000 meters, clocking 15:17.76. Afterward, she said to Ben, “When you’re fit, you’re fit!”

Ben likes to share this story as a way to make the point that optimal fitness for any given race distance isn’t so different from optimal fitness for any other distance, and that optimal training for any given race distance, therefore, isn’t very different from optimal training for any other distance. Running is running, after all, and, as Steph put it, when you’re fit you’re fit.

Not everyone agrees. There are those who believe that in order to perform optimally at a given race distance, a runner must tailor their training to the specific demands of that event. To the average runner, this approach probably seems more sophisticated than Ben Rosario’s approach of training more or less the same for all race distances. The logic goes something like this:

Short races and long races are different enough that one can imagine racing a pretty decent (if not quite optimal) 5K off a training program consisting of lots of speed and tempo work and not a single run longer than 7 miles. Likewise, one can imagine running a pretty decent marathon off a training program consisting of tons of easy running, including plenty of long runs, and no speed or tempo work whatsoever. And if one can imagine these things, then one can easily imagine that if Runner X moves toward optimal 5K training from the extreme I’ve described, and Runner Y moves toward optimal marathon training from the opposite extreme, the two runners will arrive at their respective optimal distance-specific training formulas well before they meet in the middle. In other words, Runner X will still be doing significantly more speed work and less volume/long running than Runner Y when each has completed the process of optimizing their training for their targeted race distance.

As sensible as this line of reasoning seems, I’m with Ben. Like him, I believe that runners should train in more or less the same way for all race distances, especially in the general preparation phase. Runners training for 5K’s should run almost as much and almost as far in individual runs as runners training for marathons because doing so will make them more fatigue resistant at their goal 5K pace, despite its relative brevity. Similarly, runners training for marathons should do almost as much speed and tempo work as runners training for 5K’s because doing so will increase their aerobic capacity and thereby increase the speed they can sustain for the full marathon distance, despite its relatively low intensity. Only in the specific preparation phase, encompassing the last eight weeks or so before competition, should the training formulas of runners aiming at different race distances diverge, and even then they shouldn’t diverge drastically.

Ben Rosario is hardly alone among elite running coaches in subscribing to the “when you’re fit, you’re fit” philosophy. Indeed, it has become the norm within the sport’s highest echelon. This was shown in a 2011 study published in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching. Norwegian researchers collected comprehensive training data from six elite runners, three of whom specialized in shorter events (3000 and 5000 meters) and the others of whom focused on longer events (half marathon and marathon). Members of both groups were found to have done about 80 percent of their training at low intensity and 20 percent at moderate to high intensity in all phases of the training cycle. Both groups also trained at high volume, with track runners logging between 92 and 104 miles per week in the various phases and the road racers logging between 107 and 116 miles per week. The main difference was that each group focused a little more on intensities close to their respective race pace, especially in the competition phase of training. But even then, the difference wasn’t extreme, with the track runners spending 19.4 percent of their weekly training time at marathon to half-marathon pace and 8.9 percent at 5000m to sprint speed during this period and the road racers spending 29.7 percent of their weekly training time at marathon to half-marathon pace and 5.2 percent at 5000m to sprint speed.

Also included in the study were sample training weeks from both the preparation phase and the competition phase for each of the six athletes. A close inspection of this material reveals that, for the most part, the short-race specialists and the long-race specialists were pulling their tools from the same toolkit. For example, in his preparation phase, Runner B, a track athlete, did a workout consisting of 12 x 1000 meters at altitude-adjusted marathon pace (3:13 per km), while Runner F, a marathoner, did a workout consisting of 16 x 1000 meters at sea-level marathon pace (3:25 per km) during her preparation phase.

In the concluding section of their paper, the researchers wrote, “The main finding in this study . . . was that a relatively high training volume at low intensity (62-82% of HRmax) combined with training just below and at the anaerobic threshold (82-92% of HRmax) was beneficial for the development of running performance in six Norwegian male and female track and marathon runners competing at top European level.” Notice that these statements apply to both the track runners and the road racers. The same training formula appeared to these scientists to be equally beneficial to all of the runners.

It so happens that I’m currently collaborating on a book with Ben Rosario. This post was inspired by two separate bits of this book: 1) Ben’s telling of the Stephanie Bruce anecdote I’ve retold here and 2) the training plans I’ve created for inclusion in the book. These plans cover every race distance from 5K to 100 miles, and I myself have been struck by how similar they are in terms of volume, intensity distribution, and workout types. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that you could prepare optimally for a 100-miler with one of the 5K plans or vice versa, but as a collective the plans really are consistent with the “when you’re fit, you’re fit” philosophy Ben and I share. Online versions will be available here soon.

(Yes, this entire article was nothing more than a buildup to a product tease.)

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of cramming. You fail to attend any of your American Civilization 101 classes or to do any of the required reading all semester, and then, with one week remaining before the final exam, you hit the books and burn the midnight oil in a heroic effort to catch up enough to escape with a passing grade.

Although stressful, cramming can work for students with good knowledge retention. The brain is an amazingly adaptable organ, capable of assimilating tremendous amounts of information in very little time given intensive exposure. Heck, you can learn a whole new language in a week if you fully immerse yourself in it and you’re good with accents.

It’s a different story with the rest of the body. The muscles and cardiovascular system are also highly adaptable, but they change on a much slower timescale than the brain does. You can’t cram for a marathon in the same way you can cram for a college exam. But a form of cramming is possible in marathon training under certain circumstances. Under normal circumstances, runners in marathon training build fitness at a leisurely rate, because in doing so they minimize the risk of injury and burnout and maximize the likelihood of successfully attaining peak fitness for race day. It is possible, however, to purposely build fitness more quickly, and even to aim to build fitness at the maximum rate achievable, and indeed this is precisely what I am doing now.

Here’s how I ended up here: This past winter I was on a roll—training consistently and intensively and racing well at distances ranging from 5K to the marathon. Then I got sick. Really sick. Between early March and early April I did virtually zero exercise, and as a result I hemorrhaged fitness. It wasn’t until April 8^th that I felt ready to try my first tentative test run. It went okay, and so, being who I am, I immediately set about making plans to get back to racing.

In the early days of my illness, when I assumed it was going to be the usual mild flu, I committed to all four events of the Rambling Runner Virtual Race Series: a 5K in late March, a 10K the following week, a half marathon in mid-April, and a marathon in mid-May. By the time I was back on my feet, the first two events had already past and the half marathon was just around the corner, and I was nowhere near ready for it. But I had five and a half weeks from the date of those first six 10-minute treadmill miles to prepare for the marathon. Could I pull it off? I decided to give it a shot.

The goal for me is not to achieve the sub-2:40 time I believe I would have run in the Modesto Marathon on March 27^th if COVID-19 hadn’t hit and I hadn’t gotten it. I just want to embrace the physical and mental challenge of seeing how far back I can come in such a short period of time. I’m approaching it as a test of my knowledge, experience, and judgment more than anything.

After surviving a handful of slow but increasingly normal-feeling jogs, I decided to sit down and create a plan for the last four weeks of my marathon cramming. I know this sounds like an obvious step, but I normally train without formal plans. I’ve been running long enough that I am generally able to train very effectively by creating a loose mental road map and filling in the details as I go. In this case, though, I felt the need to take a more conventional approach.

The key decisions I made are as follow: 1) I would run every other day. I was doing this even before I got sick, as I often do when some pesky sore spot in my much-abused body makes it unwise or impossible to run more often. 2) I would make every run count, alternating long runs and quality runs so that I was doing one of each every four days. And 3) I would do a ton of cross-training (indoor and outdoor cycling, steep uphill treadmill walking, and elliptical biking) to maximize my aerobic fitness development without the heightened injury risk that would attend running more. I kicked it off with a 14-mile run on April 17^th, one month out from the virtual marathon. Here’s the rest of the plan (runs appear in bold):

Week of April 19	Week of April 26	Week of May 3	Week of May 10
Hill Reps 10 x 0:30 hard uphill Strength Training Cross-training	Strength Training Cross-training	Easy Run 8 miles easy Cross-training	Cross-training 2x
Cross-training 2x	Speed Intervals 10 x 1:00 @ mile race pace Cross-Training	Strength Training Cross-training	Marathon Pace Run 14 miles including 10 miles @ marathon pace
Long Run 17 miles easy	Cross-training 2x	Tempo Run 10 miles including 6 miles @ half-marathon effort Cross-training	Strength Training Cross-training
Cross-training 2x	Long Run 23 miles easy	Cross-training 2x	Easy Run 8 miles easy Cross-training
Steady State Run 8 miles including 6 miles @ marathon effort Strength Training Cross-training	Cross-training 2x	Critical Velocity Reps 4 x 1 mile a little faster than 10K race pace Cross-training	Progression Run 8 miles with the last 3 @ 80%, 85%, and 90% Strength Training
Cross-training 2x	Strength Training Easy Run + drills and strides	Strength Training Cross-training	Cross-training
Long Run 20 miles easy	Virtual 1-Mile Race + 2-mile tempo Cross-training	Depletion Run 20 miles easy, no carbs before or during	Easy Run + drills and strides

As you can see, it’s quite aggressive, especially considering the thinness of the fitness base it builds on. But it’s not reckless. It represents the limit of what I think my body can adapt to, no more. And if it turns out to be too much at any point, I can always dial back. And if I fail to dial back sufficiently or in time and I get injured and have to take a little time off from running and delay my next race, so what? I’ve survived worse.

If you’re a relatively inexperienced runner, or a back-of-the-pack runner, stop reading now. This one’s not for you. Unless you’re just curious—then go ahead and keep reading.

For most experienced competitive runners, a marathon is a race. You sign up, pin a number on your belly, and go for broke. The workouts that serve as preparation for the marathon—long runs, tempo runs, steady-state runs, etc.—are completely distinct in form from the event itself. But they don’t have to be. I routinely runs marathons as workouts in preparing for the marathons I race. Crazy as this practice may sound, I find it effective and enjoyable, though not without risk, and I hope this article persuades at least one person to try the method.

The way I typically do it is quite simple: I run 26.22 miles (a marathon is NOT 26.2 miles, folks, and those extra couple of hundredths make several seconds’ difference!) about 10 percent slower than I could or than I hope to run in the race I’m targeting. So, for example, if I’m hoping to run my next marathon in 2:38:50, I might run a marathon workout in 2:54:43, give or take.

In fact, I am hoping to run my next marathon in 2:38:50, and it so happens that I ran a marathon workout last weekend (eight weeks out from the event). My goal in this case was a little more conservative—2:59:50—on account of the summer heat wave that swooped in just in time for the session, but I felt good despite and cruised to a time of 2:57:11.

There’s a huge difference between running a marathon at 100 percent effort and running a marathon at 90 percent effort. If you go all-out, you can’t walk down a flight of stairs the next day. But I feel absolutely fine the day after my latest marathon workout, completing two short, easy runs the very next day.

Benefits of marathon workouts

In my experience, marathon workouts offer a couple of benefits:

One is that they’re a little different from any other workout, being long and moderately aggressive in pace. As such, they occupy a sweet spot between normal long runs, which may cover the full marathon distance or more, and marathon-pace workouts, which are done at goal marathon pace but are necessarily shoulder. None of the more common workout types provides quite the same stimulus as a marathon workout.
A second benefit of the marathon-as-workout is that it can be a great confidence builder. Because these sessions are done a little slower, but only a little slower, than marathon race pace, you can finish them with a pretty solid time and plenty of running left in your legs. When they go well, they make your goal time seem more attainable.

Obviously (at least I hope it’s obvious), you need to be in very good shape before you attempt such a workout. How good? If you can run the full marathon distance at your normal easy run pace and feel no worse the next day than you do after a much shorter easy run, you’re ready. I typically do my marathon workouts between eight and three weeks before a “real” marathon. If you do it any earlier, you may risk peaking too soon; but do it any later and you risk interfering with your taper. And yes, one marathon workout per training cycle is plenty!

Marathon workouts can be done solo from home or in the context of a formal event. I’ve done both many times. The advantages of the latter include the motivation provided by other runners and spectators and also the fact that your nutrition is taken care of. Plus, you get an official marathon finish to add to your resume. The main disadvantages of doing a marathon workout in an actual marathon are the relative inconvenience compared to the solo option and the risk of getting caught up in the excitement and running too fast. Indeed, in my experience, most runners who have the fitness to do a marathon workout don’t have the discipline to hold back 10 percent if they attempt it in an actual race environment.

My own cautionary example dates back to 2008. I was in the best shape of my life and targeting a sub-2:40 performance at the Sacramento Cow Town Marathon. But a couple of weeks before the event I developed a hot spot in my right foot that curtailed my training, so I decided to run it as a workout and make the Silicon Valley Marathon my “A” race, giving me two more weeks to get sharp. I ended up cruising to a time of 2:46:58 in Sacramento, but by the time I got to Silicon Valley I was overcooked and only managed to run four and a half minutes faster, falling short of my goal. I realized too late that despite the injury setback I was already too close to peaking to delay my “A” race and should have gone ahead and taken my shot in Sacramento.

The lesson here is that, although runners who dismiss the marathon-as-workout as crazy in its very essence are wrong, there are plenty of crazy ways to run a marathon workout. So, if you’re experienced and fit and adventurous enough to try this method, plan and execute it with prudence. (I love it that I just ended an article on running marathons as workouts with the word “prudence.”)

On April 24, eight days after American running star Galen Rupp dropped out of the Boston Marathon in the 20th mile with hypothermia and breathing problems, organizers of the Prague Marathon announced that Rupp had been added to the start list of their event, to be held May 6, a day shy of three weeks after Boston.

When I saw this news I thought, ‘I can relate.’ I’ve come away from several disappointing marathons hungry for another try, and on three occasions I have acted on this hunger. Indeed, the phenomenon of the “bounce back marathon” is quite common, and understandably so. It takes a long time to prepare for a marathon, and there are so many things that can go wrong on race day that it’s unsurprising runners are often tempted to redeem a poor performance—whether it’s due to unfavorable weather, GI issues, or whatever—with a quick next marathon instead of sticking to the original plan of taking a break and starting a whole new training build-up. But are bounce back marathons a good idea?

It depends. Recently, an athlete I coach performed below his expectations in a marathon due to an ill-timed health setback that prevented him from eating anything on the day before the day before the race. Afterward, he told me he wanted to do another marathon as soon as possible in order to “take advantage of [his] fitness.” I talked him out of the idea, saying it was too risky. Subsequent events revealed this to be sound advice. Even after a week off followed by a week of very light training, this runner felt sluggish and beat-up during his runs and it took him a couple more weeks to get his feet back under him. If he had attempted a bounce back marathon instead of taking a break, it would have been a disaster.

As a general rule, attempting a bounce back marathon is a bad idea if A) you truly peaked for your last marathon (that is, you trained pretty much as hard as you could without overdoing it) and B) you ran the marathon as hard as you could and finished it. In these circumstances, your body needs a break, whether you realize it or not.

Two of my own three efforts to get right back on the horse after a disappointing marathon ended in injury. After the 2006 California International Marathon, where I aimed for 2:39 and ran 2:47, I returned to heavy training within a week and immediately developed a hamstring injury. Three years later, after the Boston Marathon, where I aimed for 2:37 and ran (and walked) 3:18, I started the Orange County Marathon 13 days later and quit halfway through with a bad case of plantar fasciitis. Only once did I get lucky, after the 2016 California International Marathon, where I aimed for 2:45 and ran 2:58 and 13 days later solo time-trialed a 2:49 marathon around my neighborhood. (Crazy as this was, I must confess it was quite satisfying.)

Bounce back marathons are less risky if you DNF your first marathon for a reason other than injury, as in these cases your body emerges less wrecked than it would be if you’d covered the full 26.2 miles. They’re also less risky if you don’t train to your limit in the cycle leading up to a marathon. I used to wonder how some of the top ultrarunners get away with competing as often as they do. Then I trained for a 50-miler and realized it’s because the body doesn’t need deep rest as often if almost all of your training is done at low intensity. I ran the Boston Marathon 15 days after my 50-miler and it went just fine because although the ultra itself had thrashed my body, the training leading up to it hadn’t.

There’s a reason nearly all professional runners specializing in the marathon distance run only two or three marathons a year. These folks need to be at the very top of their game when they compete and it would seem that two to three times per year is as often as they can achieve a true peak performance level at this distance, not so much because of that the race does to the body as because of what the training does.

Lately, though, this orthodoxy has been challenged to an extent by a few noteworthy mavericks. Last year, for example, American Sarah Hall placed fifth in October’s Frankfurt Marathon (2:21:21) and won the California International Marathon just five weeks later (2:28:10). And this year’s Boston Marathon was won by Japan’s Yuki Kawauchi, who completed 12 marathons last year, winning five.

I wouldn’t put too much weight on these special cases, however. The most important thing to keep in mind is that bounce back marathons are inimical to the goal of developing as a marathon runner. Although it is possible sometimes to turn around quickly after a marathon and perform satisfactorily in another one, you will not get better at marathoning this way. Developing as a marathoner demands that you take a break after each marathon, intentionally giving away some of that hard-earned fitness, and then start a fresh training cycle. This is the true way to “take advantage” of all the hard work you put into preparing for each marathon.

We live in a highly individualistic society, a situation that has both pluses and minuses. On the plus side, our children tend to grow up with a sense of freedom to choose their own path in life. On the minus side, a growing percentage of us are burdened by feelings of loneliness and isolation that make us unhappy and have proven consequences for our physical health.

As an endurance coach and nutritionist, I see our society’s hyperindividualism manifest in a sense of exaggerated specialness and uniqueness. Take the “I can’t eat that” phenomenon, for example. Although food allergies, intolerances, and sensitivities are real, these conditions are claimed far more often in some societies and groups than in others—specifically in the most individualistic societies and groups. Asserting the need for a special diet is in many cases a way of asserting personal specialness.

Individualized approach to Endurance training

I see individuality overemphasized to some extent in the training realm too. In the 35 years I’ve been involved in endurance sports, I’ve observed a growing receptiveness to the notion that individual athletes training for the same event (e.g., a marathon) should do so in different ways based on genetic differences that affect how their bodies respond to various training stimuli. Contributing to this trend are studies such as one that was conducted by Canadian researchers and published on the online journal PLoS One in 2016, which found that when subjects were placed on an all-low-intensity exercise program for three weeks and, separately, on an all-high-intensity exercise program during a second three-week period, some subjects exhibited improved fitness only after the former and others only after the later, while only a few improved on both programs and no subject failed to improve on both.

Should we conclude from such findings that individual athletes should indeed take radically different approaches to training for races? I think not. The problem with a radically individualized approach to endurance training is that in essence it amounts to training for what you’re good at rather than training to be good at the specific event for which you are preparing. To return to our earlier example, a marathon is a very long race undertaken at a low to moderate intensity. No matter what your genetic makeup is, you won’t be optimally prepared to run a marathon unless your training features lots of running and frequent prolonged efforts at low to moderate intensity. Training for a marathon with a heavy emphasis on short, high-intensity intervals because you happen to be highly responsive to this type of training is only slightly less absurd than training for a marathon exclusively by chopping wood because testing has demonstrated that you are most responsive to this type of training.

But wait: If your body simply doesn’t adapt to low-intensity exercise, as the above-mentioned study suggests is the case for some individuals, then what benefit can these folks get from this type of training even if it is a marathon they’re preparing for? Good question, the answer to which is that of course every athlete really is capable of adapting to high-volume low-intensity exercise. The Canadian study cited above measured a few select variables such as VO₂max and lactate threshold. But a marathon is not a VO₂max test. So-called non-responders to low-intensity exercise who do not experience an increase in VO₂max in response to this type of training but who do a bunch of it any way will undergo a host of other adaptations, including increased fat-burning ability and heightened resistance to impact-related muscle damage, that are crucial to marathon performance.

This is to say nothing of the neural and psychological adaptations. A runner who routinely does long training runs at low to moderate intensity will see improvements in central fatigue resistance and inhibitory control that he couldn’t gain any other way. Physiology aside, the experience of going long is an essential contributor to the capacity to go long.

The same principle holds for supposed non-responders to high-intensity exercise. A runner of this type who includes a small amount of high-intensity exercise in his training despite deriving no boost in aerobic capacity from it is sure to come away with other benefits, such as increased perceived effort tolerance, that will translate into better performance in real-world competition.

I don’t want to overstate my case. It is undeniably true that each athlete is unique and responds somewhat differently than do other athletes to the same training stimuli. But this individuality is itself overstated in some quarters, and again, even to the extent that athletes are different they must consider the specific demands of the event they’re preparing for before they consider their particular athletic type in deciding how to train.

The proper way to individualize training, therefore, is not to start from scratch with each athlete, inventing from whole cloth the method that is uniquely optimal for that individual. Rather, all athletes should begin by training with the methods that have proved most effective with athletes generally (80/20, etc.) and then fine-tune their formula based on how their body responds to these methods. And fine-tuning never means replacing running with chopping wood.

Running is a hobby for the vast majority of runners. Only for a tiny fraction of the runner population is the sport a livelihood. Because the pros depend on their race performances to put food on the table, they typically do everything in their power to maximize their performance. This no-stone-unturned approach to running is what I call the livelihood mindset.

Even the most competitive recreational runners can’t always justify doing everything the pros do to maximize their performance—things like flying to Phoenix for an appointment with physiotherapist-to-the-stars John Ball or doing three weeks of altitude training in Mammoth Lakes, California. They have to set limits on the lengths they are willing to go to run faster. I call this the hobby mindset.

The thing is, competitive recreational runners often exercise a hobby mindset unnecessarily, not doing things they easily could do to improve. But they set these artificial limits only half-consciously or even unconsciously, unaware that they are making a hobby-minded choice when they have the opportunity to make a livelihood-minded choice that would help them get to the finish line of their next race faster.

I’ll give you a personal example. This past summer I spent three months in Flagstaff training with HOKA One One Northern Arizona Elite, a team of top professional runners. The whole point of this experience was to treat running as if it were my livelihood for a short period of time. Prior to relocating to Flagstaff, I had pretty much given up on seeking medical help for running-related injuries. It was just too much of a hassle. But during those three months of living like a pro I made liberal use of the resources available to me. I dealt with two significant injuries while in Flagstaff and I am certain that my experiment would not have ended as successfully as it did (with a PR at the Chicago Marathon) had I tried to manage these problems on my own as I do at home.

Among the most common situations in which I see recreational runners exercise a hobby mindset unnecessarily, and to their own detriment, has to do with marathon fueling. One thing I’ve noticed in interacting with elite marathon runners is that they all take in lots of carbs during races in the form of sports drinks and gels. On the one hand, this fact is unremarkable. Research has proven beyond any doubt that the more carbohydrate a runner consumes during a marathon, the better he or she performs. But on the other hand, the fact that all elite runners consume lots of carbs during marathons is noteworthy when you consider that many recreational runners take in little or no carbohydrate because sports drinks and gels don’t agree with them.

Where are the elite runners with whom sports drinks and gels don’t agree? They do exist. But they consume large amounts of carbs during marathons anyway, either by simply putting up with GI discomfort or by relentlessly experimenting with different products and fueling strategies until they find something that works for them.

Consider Shalane Flanagan. In 2010, Shalane made her marathon debut in New York. At the first elite aid station, located at 5K, she drank a few ounces of the sports drink she had chosen for the event. Unfortunately, it upset her stomach to the point that she was unable to drink any more for the remainder of the race, finishing second nevertheless.

All too many recreational runners who have this type of experience decide that taking carbs on the run just isn’t for them and fuel subsequent marathons with water only or with dubious alternatives such ketones or medium-chain triglycerides. In more extreme cases, they may go on a high-fat diet to ensure they don’t “need” carbs during marathons (a misguided notion if there ever was one, as all runners benefit from taking in carbs during marathons regardless of their fat-burning capacity—it’s not about “needing” them).

Shalane, however, understood that her livelihood depended on finding a way to successfully absorb more carbs during future marathons and she put a lot of effort into this project. I know because I happen to be one of the experts she sought out for advice. When Shalane returned to the New York City Marathon in 2017, she consumed four ounces of Gatorade every 5K run and a gel packet every 45 minutes—and, of course, she won the race.

There are lots of other ways in which recreational runners routinely hold themselves back by exercising a hobby mindset when they don’t need to. Among them are doing strength exercises (e.g. chest press) that make a person look better and run slower, racing too often, avoiding unpleasant workout types, and overdressing for cold-weather races. I’m not saying that any of these performance-sabotaging choices is inherently bad. I’m just saying that you should make them with open eyes, fully aware that you are sacrificing performance for something else (such as comfort in the case of overdressing).

Occasionally the pros slip into a hobby mindset too. When I was in Flagstaff, NAZ Elite member Rochelle Kanuho confessed to me that she had always wanted six-pack abs, not because they would help her running but because she liked how they looked. In pursuit of this look, she did a ton of core work. No matter how hard she tried, however, she couldn’t get her abs to show. Frustrated, she stopped doing core work, which caused her core to weaken, which caused her to develop a low-back injury.

We’re all human!

A friend of mine ran the California International Marathon recently. CIM is known for producing more Boston Marathon qualifiers (relative to field size) than any marathon other than Boston itself, and indeed my friend’s goal was to BQ. As a 40-year-old male, he needed to finish in 3:12, give or take, to claim a slot. He stayed right on pace through 22 miles, but then cramped up and faded to 3:18—still a PR, but not what he was hoping for.

Afterward, my friend and I had a conversation about what had gone wrong. He had no clue beyond the fact that he had cramped. I asked him how he had trained for his qualifying attempt. He told me he’d run four times per week: three six-mile runs during the workweek and a long run of up to 22 miles on the weekend. I told him the reason he’d hit the wall was obvious: He hadn’t trained enough!

I’m aware that some marathoners don’t have time to run more often than four times per week or more than 40 total miles in a single week. But this wasn’t the case with my friend. It just hadn’t crossed his mind to train more. I see this all the time as a coach—runners who could achieve more if they trained more set an arbitrary cap on their training volume that is not based on how much running they have time for or how much their body can handle.

Coincidentally, the day after CIM a new study on the differences in training patterns between slower and faster marathon runners was published in the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine. Researchers from the Cambridge Centre for Sport and Exercise Science gathered comprehensive data on the training regimens of 97 recreational marathoners. To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, they found that faster runners trained a lot more than slower ones. The following table summarizes their findings.

Marathon Time	2.5-3 Hours	3-3.5 Hours	3.5-4 Hours	4-4.5 Hours	4.5-5 Hours
Average Runs per Week	5.7	5.0	4.1	4.9	4.4
Average Miles Per Week	56.9	50.5	38.7	34.8	27.2

There are two ways to interpret this information. On the one hand, it might be looked at as evidence that faster marathoners are faster because they train more. On the other hand, the same evidence might suggest that faster marathoners tend to train more. I think it goes without saying that the first interpretation is true to a certain degree. The more we train as runners, the faster we get. But I think it’s also true that faster marathoners choose to train more because they are faster. Why, though?

Human nature is the short answer. People tend to invest more time and effort in activities they feel they’re good at. It doesn’t take long for each new runner to get some sense of his or her natural ability level. Those who have a knack for it are prone to keep piling on the miles in pursuit of their ultimate limit, whereas those with average or below-average speed are more likely to decide that their ability level is not worthy of an investment exceeding 40 miles per week. This calculus is seldom conscious, but it’s no less real for that. I’ve interacted with thousands of runners over many years and the pattern is clear: Less gifted runners typically hold a tacit belief that they do not deserve to train a lot.

Personally, I feel that passion, not talent, should determine how hard a runner trains. If you love running enough to want to find out how good you can be, even if you’re really not that good, then you should go for it. I’m happy to say that I communicated this message to the friend of mine who fell short of his goal at CIM and he has committed to step up his training for the next marathon. How about you?

Benefits of marathon workouts

Individualized approach to Endurance training

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