Deciding that I want to run a marathon by the end of the year left me with me with the question, “how do I prepare for this?”. Aside from the obvious answer of, “run more miles”, I don’t know what to do to start preparing for a marathon. This is one reason that I’ve given myself around seven months before running a marathon, so that I can be sure to learn what I need to learn and ramp up slowly enough to avoid injury.
I’ve scheduled my weekly runs for the next couple months, gradually increasing miles from week to week. I’m starting this week at 26 miles, spread across five days, which is close to where I left on from my half marathon training. I’m going to add-on two miles each week until I reach 35 miles, staying with a five day a week plan. After I make it to 35 miles a week, I plan to hold that distance until August, and work on improving at that weekly mileage as much as possible.
In August I will start an actual marathon training program, most of the ones I’ve seen so far are about 16 weeks. I think after having run 35 miles a week for close two months, I should be in a good position to start training for a marathon in November. I haven’t yet picked a specific training program for this, I’m going to wait until closer to August to see what I feel like I can handle. One obvious downside to this schedule is starting the marathon training in August, which will no doubt be a crazy hot month, so that will mean a lot of early morning runs.
I also need to start working in cross training, but I haven’t figured that part out yet. I don’t yet know what I should be doing or how much I should be doing. I’m researching this though and hoping to start hitting the gym soon. This is probably one of the bigger questions I have right now, hopefully I’ll get it right!
Beyond my normal training runs, I’m signed up for several races in the next few weeks. I have a 10K this saturday, a 5K next saturday, and then the Warrior Dash in early June. I’m sure I’ll also sign up for some more races in June and then some in July. I’m hoping these races will be a good measurement of how I’m progressing.
That’s what I have now, I imagine a lot of this will change over the months, since I really don’t know if I’m doing too much, too little, or if I’m in the right range. Of course schedules are easily broken by life, so the schedule will have to be flexible over the next few months. I’m excited to get started and see where this takes me!
Josh Williams 