The Long Run

Right now I'm just fifteen days away from the marathon, the long hard miles of training are behind me, and now training is just about allowing my body to recover a little from the training and keeping sharp ready for the race day.

I thought I'd blog on probably the most important part of marathon training, the long run. Its the part of the training that prepares you for the battle against your own body, when its telling you it has had enough, you have to show it you've got more to give. You can't just start running for two hours plus without preparing yourself, like the marathon itself, the long runs should be built up to. I remember when I first started out, when I first caught the running bug, 10k seemed a huge obstacle, and it was, but once I'd got it out the way I kept going and the path to being able to run a half marathon was surprisingly easy.

However, going beyond a half marathon presents a whole world of problems. Firstly is the time, to prepare for a marathon you will need to do training runs that last more than two hours, its not easy to find that time in your schedule, especially when you know afterwards you will be an exhausted wreck, and unable to do anything productive for the rest of the day. The second major problem is that the body, apparently, is just not designed to run for more than two hours. Basically the body keeps on board enough fast-burning fuel (carbohydrates) to do two hours of continued exercise, but after that it has to go to the slow-burning stuff, and that's when things start to get difficult. The third major obstacle is dehydration, in training you don't get tables of water at the side of the road at regular intervals, if you need liquid you have to carry it yourself, which isn't a straightforward undertaking when you are running  for such a long time.

Different training plans have different desired lengths for long runs, imperial based plans tend to go for 20 miles, while metric ones go for 30 kilometres, I guess people just like numbers ending in 0. I have no idea what is necessary to prepare for a marathon, but I can say what I've done and I'll tell you afterwards if it was enough. Last year I did my longest run in the first week of March, 35km (21.8 miles) but a couple of weeks later I was injured, and by the time the marathon came around I was out of practice of doing long runs.

This year I have always been behind in my preparations compared to last year, and this has meant I haven't reach the same distances in training runs. I have only gone beyond 30 kilometres once, compared to twice last year, and my longest run in 2011 so far is 31.1km (19.3 miles), notable less than the 35km run before London. However, for the first time in three years I've started April without an injury, well at least without an injury that stops me running (my hip/back is still complaining a little).

I did my longest run four weeks before the race. There are varying opinions in the various guides on training on when your taper should start, some say you can do your last long run as late as a week before the race, others that you need at least a day to recover from each mile of your long run, so if you are doing a 20 mile training run it should be 3 weeks before the race. I went for a safety first approach, I went out with three weeks to go to the race uncertain on how far to push things, in the end I thought given my history I was best to be cautious so instead pushing on to another 30k+ run I came home after 17k.

I'm not sure what my point here is exactly, I guess its just to put down a record of what I've done, and why I did it, then after the race I can come back and see how things worked out.

I'll be back soon with a blog on my last race before Madrid, the half marathon in Elche this past Sunday.
Until then, happy running.

El maratonero