September 18, 2010

The Marathon: Make time for your training

The final chapter in my book Powered From Within: Stories About Running & Triathlon is about marathon training, originally a feature I wrote for the September/October 2008 issue of Canadian Running magazine.

One of the two coaches I interviewed about marathon training was Kevin Smith. He talked about the importance of making sure that you allocate time in your schedule to train for a marathon, yet at the same the time it's not as time-consuming as you may think.

“We have ways to help people realise what time commitment is to appropriately determine it. Some people overestimate it. You don’t have to change your entire existence, you don’t have to quit your job, you don’t have to swear off seeing your friends, and literature – you don’t have to give up all these things, but you do have to be very efficient about what you are doing and how you do it. 

"We’re talking about 3 to 4 runs a week. Depending on your pace and your volume, that’s going to be anywhere from 6 to 12 hours a week, including cross training.” 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Margreet
This is a topic I have written about a couple of times now, and I think the perception is that to train for a marathon you have to treat it like a part time job!

It's all about training smart and not wasting training effort on unproductive sessions.

Here are the posts where I elaborate more. They are ultramarathon focused, but the concepts can easily be applied to regular marathons:

http://ultra-marathon-running.blogspot.com/2010/06/simple-ultramarathon-training-plan.html

http://ultra-marathon-running.blogspot.com/2010/06/ultramarathon-training-but-i-just-dont.html