9+1. Charity. Lottery.
However you became one of the lucky participants in this year’s New York City Marathon, you’ll be running 26.2 miles come November 1st. Hoards of people gather along the route to watch each amazing runner chase their goals: some may be running to achieve a time goal, another may be just looking to cross the finish line, others are running for a cause near and dear to their heart. Regardless of reason, 26.2 miles is no easy feat; however, what the spectators don’t see is that the real work happens in training. So, you’ve built your foundation, you bought your gels, you broke in your running sneakers, now the only thing left to do is train for race day. When it comes to building your distance and designing your training program, the most important part is planning.
Here are some guidelines to help you get started:
10% increase in distance per week
When planning your training, not only is frequency of running an important factor, but so is the progression in distance. In order to reduce your risk of over-training, add up your miles each week and make sure you don’t exceed 10% of the distance of the previous week.
For example, if you are running:
Monday: 4 miles
Tuesday: 5 miles
Thursday: 4 miles
Saturday: 10 miles
Total weekly miles: 23 miles
The following week, you can keep the same weekday distances and run up to 12.3 miles on Saturday, for a ~25 mile week. Or, you can keep your weekend the same and add 1 mile to each of the 4 mile runs, also a ~25 mile week.
Every 3 weeks → drop the distance
When training for a long distance run, it can be easy to assume that you just increase your long distances every week until race day. However, if you continue to increase your long run distance for too long, this can increase risk of overuse injuries such as tendonitis and stress fractures – even if you’re following the 10% rule.
A good rule of thumb is that for every 2-3 weeks of building distance, take one week to decrease your long distance. To help keep you in the 10% increases each week, you can designate more miles to your shorter weekday runs to help maintain your conditioning.
For example, if you ran your third Building Week as
Monday: 4 miles
Tuesday: 5 miles
Thursday: 4 miles
Saturday: 15 miles
Total weekly miles: 28 miles
You can run your Drop Week as
Monday: 4 miles
Tuesday: 7 miles
Thursday: 5 miles
Saturday: 12 miles
Total weekly miles: 28 miles
In this case, you can add your 10% increase onto your long run the following week, safely jumping from 15 miles up to 17 miles and return to lighter weekday runs.
Resistance Training
This wouldn’t be a marathon training article without mentioning resistance training. Planning 1-2 days of resistance training will not only help with increasing your running speed, but it will also help your muscles move in different directions. Moving outside of the sagittal plane (front/back motions) helps to target muscles that support your running form and reduce the risk of joint-related pain as your running volume increases.
Explore exercises that move you in the frontal plane (side to side) and transverse plane (rotation). Some frontal and transverse plane exercises include:
- Sidelying hip abduction
- Monster walks
- Clamshells
- Copenhagen planks
- Russian twists
When doing your resistance training, don’t forget about the upper body! Loading the arms helps with running posture, a steady arm swing, and overall muscular endurance while letting your legs recover.
Recovery
Speaking of recovery, planning 1-2 rest days per week helps the muscles, tendons, and joints strengthen in response to the increased distance. Rest days don’t necessarily mean complete rest; your rest days can include walking, mobility work, and adequate sleep.
Pain During Training?
So let’s say you followed the framework, made your plan, put in some weeks of training, but now there’s pain, during or after your run. What do you do? Do you take a week off? Do you slow your pace? Do you just push through? The best decision you can make is to seek the guidance of a physical therapist, the earlier the better. Working with a skilled physical therapist, ideally who has experience working with runners, will be your best bet to continuing forward with your miles while simultaneously treating your body and reducing pain.
