Pfitzinger Pete - Advanced Marathoning

Each 7-day microcycle will typically consist of three hard training sessions. This is the maximum number of hard sessions that most distance runners can respond to positively. A few runners can handle four hard sessions per week, and some runners can handle only two. Considering that there are at least five categories of hard training sessions that you can do, it takes a good deal of intelligent planning to come up with the optimal training program for you. The training schedules in this book are structured around five mesocycles per macrocycle and generally include three hard training sessions per microcycle.

Training provides a variety of stimuli that lead to adaptations that improve your marathon performance. Training also gives you the confidence that comes with setting and achieving challenging training goals. However, training doesn’t completely prepare you for the marathon. An additional component to successful marathoning can be gained only by racing.

Tune-up races are important benchmarks of your fitness and prepare you mentally for the rigors of racing. Because less is at stake, even the toughest workout isn’t as mentally demanding as a race. After all, in a race, when you’re competing against other runners, there’s a fine margin between relative success and relative failure. Similarly, in a race you’re committed to finish (or you should be) whether you’re having a good day or a lousy day; in a workout, if things aren’t going well, you can always stop early with your pride relatively intact. The all-out aspect of racing provides a mental hardening that’s necessary to run a good marathon. When runners do no premarathon tune-up races, they have greater anxiety leading up to the marathon.

Tune-up races serve two purposes. First, they provide feedback on your fitness, reducing an element of uncertainty about your marathon preparation. Second, they make you go through the nerves of racing, helping to reduce anxiety in the last few days and hours before the marathon. When you’re at your limit in the marathon, feeling tired, wondering whether you can hang on even though there are still 10 miles (16 km) to go, it helps to have been through the demands of racing at shorter distances. Even though the ultimate test (the marathon) is crueler, the preparation gained from shorter races is priceless.

By tune-up races, we mean all-out efforts, not races in which you give less than your best, such as races you use as the setting for a tempo run or marathon-pace run. Tune-up races can vary in length from 8K (5 mi) to 25K, depending on their training purpose. Races of 5K or shorter are less specific to marathon success, and races of 30K or longer require too much recovery.

Tune-up race distances can be divided into two categories. Races of 15K to 25K take at least 5 days to recover from, and you must place them strategically in your training program. These races provide the greatest physiological and psychological benefit. Therefore, prepare for these races with a mini-taper of 4 to 6 days. You can’t afford to taper any longer than 6 days because the tune-up race isn’t your primary goal, and you need to keep training for the marathon. A tune-up race of 15K to 25K really represents a training block of at least 10 days, consisting of 4 to 6 days of tapering, the race itself, and several days’ recovery before the next hard training session.

The second category of tune-up race distances is 8K to 12K. These races take less out of you and require less tapering and fewer recovery days than races of 15K or longer. You can approach tune-up races of 8K to 12K in two ways. First, you can train through them and treat them as an all-out effort done while fatigued. This will provide an excellent training stimulus as well as a mental challenge that will help steel you for the marathon. Racing when tired, however, brings the danger of believing that your finishing time and place represent your current fitness level. If you typically race 10K in 32:00 but run 33:10 in a tune-up race, you could interpret the result as meaning you’re not in shape, and you might start to train harder or become discouraged. It’s important to put the result in the context of the situation.

The other way to approach a tune-up race of 8K to 12K is to do a mini-taper and give yourself a couple of recovery days. This is the appropriate approach if you’re using the race to assess your fitness level or as a confidence booster leading up to the marathon. Table 1.4 indicates how close to a tune-up race you can do a hard workout without going into the race fatigued. Although you won’t see the benefits of the workout in this week’s race, you should be recovered enough so the workout doesn’t detract from your race performance.

Tempo runs are the easiest to recover from because they don’t break down the body as much as other forms of hard training. Long runs require at least 4 days of recovery to put in a good race effort, although replenishing glycogen stores generally requires only 48 hours. Interval workouts put the body under the most stress and require the longest time to recover from.

Now you know what physiological traits are needed to run a good marathon and how to train to improve those traits. More so than with any other popular distance, though, success in the marathon depends not only on what you do to your body but also on what you put in your body. Proper nutrition and hydration are critical when training for and running a marathon. They’re the subjects of the next chapter.

This chapter looks at two critical but often misunderstood factors in marathon preparation and racing – nutrition and hydration. Why are these matters critical? Because the two factors that typically conspire to make you slow in the last few miles of the marathon are glycogen depletion and dehydration. By understanding the role of nutrition for marathon preparation and racing, you can develop strategies to optimize your marathon performance.

This chapter discusses the importance of staying well hydrated and how to prevent dehydration, the roles of carbohydrate and fat as the primary fuels for endurance exercise and how to prevent glycogen depletion, the role of protein for endurance athletes, the need to maintain normal iron levels, and nutrition considerations for racing the marathon. Understanding the information in this chapter is an essential component of your marathon preparation.

Staying well hydrated is vital to successful marathoning during training and racing. Becoming dehydrated negatively affects your running performance and also slows your ability to recover for the next workout. Your blood and other fluids help remove waste products and bring nutrients to tissues for repair. Replacing lost fluids as quickly as possible after running, therefore, will speed your recovery.

Let’s take a look at the physiology of dehydration. When you sweat, the following chain of events occurs:

• Your blood volume decreases, so

• less blood returns to your heart; therefore,