#breaking3

Are you training for a spring marathon? Are you trying to go fast? Do you want to go under 3 hours? Can you? #marathontraining #Hamburg marathon #Running #marathon

Forget #breaking2 a lot of normal experienced runners still dream about going under the 3 hour mark.  This spring I am going to set about  helping a group do just that.  

In 2010 I established the sub3club and trained a group of people to reach this goal. All of them hit this mark apart from one who had to visit the toilet during the last phase of the marathon, but he still ran a personal best. The next year I helped another group hit the mark, and since then I have trained a lot more people to hit this mark in the last 7 years.  In 2016 I also ran Hamburg Marathon as a Pace-Maker for 3:00 bringing a lot of people over the finish line in an evenly paced effort and enabling them to hit their goals and/or smash their personal bests.

Over the winter and the spring of 2017/2018 I am going to be doing both. Firstly I will be taking a group of runners aiming at running between 2:50-3:05 and pushing them through some key big sessions that will help prepare them for the Marathon.

These sessions will be tough, but controlled, as I believe that athletes should be training to improve themselves and not to punish themselves.

The training sessions will be on Sundays and start in January. However, you want to be fit enough to run two hours aerobically comfortably.  You don't want to be too fit or in heavy training when you start your build, as you are either going to breakdown before the Marathon, get sick over winter, or never be able to freshen up and be faster when it counts.

Before signing up for this campaign you need to know whether your dream of sub 3 is a realistic one for 2018 or not. So what does it take? Obviously your training and racing history, body composition, and age plays a part in how much you are going to be able to improve on your last marathon or race.  But we need to draw a line on what realistic is.  According to Jack Daniels VDOT table an athlete wanting to go 3:05 or faster they should have run the following times or faster:

5km : 19:25

10km: 40:10

Half Marathon: 1:29:00

There are obviously people that could have run between 3:10-3:15 previously and under a better build-up be able to run under 3:05, but you are still going to be able to run over 5 or 10km fast enough because obviously it must be considerably faster than marathon race pace.

Just in case you have not worked it out that is 4:15/km if you want to run 2:59.

My aim is develop your running economy and strength endurance to enable you to maintain your pace throughout the Marathon.  

When you prepare properly there is no wall in the marathon or man with the hammer.  The four best marathons that I have run ended with me pushing the intensity up in the last 10km. There may not have more speed, but I was able to maintain my pace while others were dropping theirs, which resulted in me making up places, and running personal bests each time.  

The key is to prepare yourself for the Marathon so that you can enough strength and pace judgement to hold everything together, so that you are not struggling as you hit the last 10km.  The is the case regardless of whether you are trying to break 3,4, or 5 hours, but the margin of error between success and not hitting your goal is smaller the faster we go.

One thing that is really important and something that we will train is race hardness.  In order to run fast you haven't get very comfortable at running a pace that is slightly uncomfortable.  It is not that case that as you get faster in general that your marathon pace will be easier.  It is more the case that we can run a 5km at a lot higher intensity, hold a slightly slower pace over 10km (roughly  5-10 seconds per kilometer), and that the intensity that we can sustain for a half and full marathon is also a lot higher.  

Basically unless you can put yourself in the hurt box a little bit, get comfortable, and stay as smooth as possible you are not going to be able to run a fast marathon, or a marathon that is on your limit of your ability.

To get better at this I recommend racing more often, and racing under distance why, how, and when I will explain in a bit more depth in my next article.  

This is something that we will also incorporate during the build-up for the spring marathon.

We will not be training together every long run, because the other long runs can be done in a slightly relaxed pace.  We will be working hard and then your body will need rest to get the most out of this work.

The training dates for the sub3club are:

21.01.2018

18.02.2018

18.03.2018

25.03.2018

15.04.2018

The other important factor is that I will be running Hamburg as the three hour pace-maker. Which means if you are on the edge of hurting this time I can help get you there on the day.

If you want to know more you can email me or come and have a talk with me in Laufwerk.