Right before Christmas, I made the decision that I was going to be doing the BMO Vancouver Marathon on May 4th, 2014. I gave myself about 14 weeks to train for the marathon, only because I have done 3 marathons before and I try to keep myself well-conditioned. Normally, I recommend a solid 20-22 weeks to train for one.
I signed up for the marathon because I want to get a personal best. Ideally, I would like to finish in about 3 hours and 15 minutes, even though my previous personal best is 3 hours 25 minutes.
Since I already feel like I’ve built up a lot of my base, I knew that I had to focus a bit more on speed training this time around, just to see how much difference it would make. So I signed up for a series of shorter races, ranging from 5k to half marathon, using all of them to keep myself motivated to do more speed work. I have also redesigned my own marathon training program and I am testing it on myself before I try to do something similar with clients.
The first week, I had 2 speed workouts, where I was doing 1km intervals with 90 second rest between each. I would shoot for 4 minute kilometers or just a few seconds under. I feel most challenged at around 3:50 per kilometer when I’m doing repeats.
Then, I had 2 runs that were longer than 10k. One of the runs was 15km and the other was 12km. The longer runs were done at a comfortably hard pace, only because I didn’t really classify 15km as a “long run” per se. Compared to a marathon, 15km is actually quite short, so again, I went at a faster pace than if I were to do a marathon.
The second week, I focused on hills and longer comfortably hard runs. My favorite hill to run is Mount Doug, because it’s so steep and challenging. The first time I ran up it, I made it once and thought it was awesome. The second time I did it in that same week, I completed two ascents up Mount Doug. I felt very accomplished because both ascents took me the exact same length of time. It’s important, because it’s the equivalent of an “even split” where the first half is done at the same pace as the second half.
The longer comfortably hard runs consisted of a 15km run and a 17km run. Normally, I don’t recommend doing that pace or distance in the second week, but I have already built an established base for running from previous rounds of marathon training.
So I had 4 training runs each week for the past 2 weeks, which is a very realistic and maintainable number. Anything more than that and I feel like I would be doing too much, as I also lift. Anything less than that and I feel like I would not benefit much from the training.
Cedar 12k tomorrow! Wish me luck! That’s another one of my speed training runs. Just a lot more fun to do them as a race.