Novice of marathon training program

Long distance running easily causes over-used damage. These injures at the first time will have the corresponding symptoms, and the most common symptom is pain. But many novice will ignore the little pain when preparing for a marathon which may lead to serious problems in the future. The following is the recommended marathon training program:

The first step: run enough (adhere to 2 weeks)

If you are a novice, on the first day, you can run 2 kilometers. If you can bear the intensity, you can continue to run until you are tired. You can control the intensity, after all, each person’s body is different. (my own experience: because of the long sedentary, lack of exercise, on the first day of run, when I only run about 3 km, I was so tired and barely run 4 km.) “Keeping fit” is one of the most important suggestions for a marathon runner while most people ignore it. That means that you don’t have to train so hard even injured. It is better to train a little bit less and make people full of desire to train, rather than to train too much.

The second step: slowly increasing the amount to adapt to the long run (adhere to 2 months)

The distance only increase 10% in a week. Each time only increased by 1 km before long run reaches 10km. If you want to increase distance, you can increase 2 km each time. During this stage, you’d better want to fast, and you should keep stability. You should pay attention to you own body. If you feel uncomfortable, you should end the training and have a rest.

The third step: long distance run (adhere to 3-4 months)

The less you have a marathon, the slower you run, the more important it is for you to run a long distance. You need to run 3 hours, 4 hours or more. After second steps of training, you should be able to easily run 10km. You can run up to 40-50km in a week. For a novice, in generally, it is limited in about 12KM, so try to break through the limit. You’d better do special training of running 12km on the weekend. You can have a day off before the running and add distance every week. At the same time, you can slowly try to run more than 5 hours (including walk and rest, pay attention to the injured, not overdo sth.). This step will last for a long time, about 3-4 months, until the completion of the Half Marathon (about 21km).

The fourth step: practice marathon speed (adhere to 3 months)

We can say that the key to success in running a marathon is to match speed. If you have the right speed, anyone can run marathon, 42 kilometers. If you run too fast, you will crash right now. But if you run slowly enough at first, you can achieve your goal. Whether you’re running a marathon for 3 hours or 5 hours, you must feel the pace and try to control your pace, and try to run the marathon. Take the progressive marathon pace to run a long distance.

The fifth step: participate in competition to absorb experience

For a novice, it is very important to take part in road races before the marathon. Running a race against time will give you a rare and valuable experience, such as how to warm up, how to adjust the pace, how to add water, how to eat before and after the game, when to eat something, whether your shoes will let your feet blisters and so on. Your greatest hope, of course, is that make the least mistakes in the most important marathon.

There are two ways predicting the completion time of your marathon. The firs way is that using your best 10 km result multiply 4.65 times. The second way is that using your half marathon time multiply 2, and then using the total time multiply 110%.