How to run a marathon

Someone (you know who you are!) asked me recently if I followed a training program of some sort to prepare for marathons... short answer: no, I don't.

Longer answer:

I don't really like the idea of strictly following someone else's program... as such, I'd much rather understand how training works and come up with something that makes sense and works for me. Having a young family, I also don't have the time to strictly follow any program - some weekends just won't work for a long run, so the flexibility to do what I can when I can rather than what the program says is good! So, here's some points that guide me in that process:

1. Listen to your body. This is probably the most important: if you're running and your knee is hurting, it's telling you something. Perhaps your shoes are wrong. Perhaps you've been running on the one side of the road too much (camber can cause injury!). Perhaps you've increased your distance too quickly recently. Or perhaps you're just soft and should toughen up. You need to work out which is true!
2. Build slowly. Most people would say that you shouldn't increase your weekly distance by more than 10%. I agree. So if you're starting with a base of one 5km run/week, it's going to take a while to get up to running 5km/day! If you increase distance too quickly, you'll probably end up injured.
3. Total mileage. In preparing for a marathon, you need to get your legs used to running. Lots. And the easiest way to do that is to run as regularly as you can, rather than longer runs less often. Running 15km once a week is not going to be enough - running 8km five times a week gets far more miles into your legs, which I see as important.
4. Long runs. These are probably the toughest thing for me to fit in: ideally, I'd like to do around 6 runs between 28 and 32km. I don't think I've yet achieved that for any of my marathons so far. I don't think going beyond 32km is a good idea - you end up taking too much out and not being able to train properly for a week afterwards. But you do need to get up around that 30km mark to get used to being on your feet for a long time, as well as building mental strength.

There's plenty of resources out there to help: I have an old edition of Noakes' classic - it's great. Coolrunning is a forum with plenty of experienced runners that dispense useful advice, along with some that will tell you you're doing it wrong, regardless of what you're doing. Lots of stuff to filter through.

So there you go, that's what I can think of for now - and obviously take any of this with a (large) grain of salt - I'm a marathoner that is yet to be entirely happy with any of my marathons!