Sunday July 23rd 2006 Memories of the Marathon

What’s it like to run a marathon?

The operative word here is run. Thousands of people complete the London Marathon each year but how many run from start to finish? Now my next statement may seem harsh but you can only say you have run a marathon if you have run from start to finish, 26.2 miles. If you take walk breaks – even 15 seconds – you have only completed the distance, not run it.

Elitist ******* I hear you say! Not at all, I don’t care if it takes you 2hrs 4min or 5hrs 4 min, the marathon is a long distance running race, so your goal should be to do just that, run it. To achieve this is not easy, you have to prepare correctly. This can be anything from 12 weeks to 12 months depending on your present state of run fitness. Elite runners would have about a 12-week build up due to their everyday mileage (anything from 80 to 120 miles per week) whereas someone who has done little or no specific run training would need to get run fit to be able to start marathon training – ‘get fit for your sport, don’t use your sport to get fit’ – so this person could well be looking at 12 months gradual build up.

With my marathon training programmes I cater for the complete beginner (the last time you ran was for the bus) up to the more experienced runner who is looking to run under 3hrs or 2hrs 30min or just that new P.B.. I have not put any elite training programmes on my site as I can’t believe that our elite marathon runners surf the net looking for training programmes, if they do the coaching system is worse than I thought.

Posted by Lynn Ferris at 23:31 GMT