If “run a marathon” is on your list of 2013 goals, then I would like to give you a few tips to help you reach that goal and learn to love running even more. 🙂
These are things that I wish I knew before I ran my first one, as well as some training and racing techniques that I learned from my previous experiences and from talking to other runners about marathons.
1. Build up your basic cardio endurance. Marathon running is an endurance event, so it makes sense that you focus on increasing the mileage and time as you train for it. You should be able to sustain a fairly consistent pace for a long period of time.
2. Continue with your normal weight training routine. If you just run, you are going to see atrophy in other muscles of the body that are not being used as much while running. It’s important to maintain a balance amongst all the muscles in order to avoid injuries caused by muscle imbalances.
3. Nutrition is important in training. If you are doing long runs that last over 2 hours, you should consume enough calories from the right types of foods for you to have enough energy to do those runs and still function normally throughout your day. If you don’t have enough calories from complex carbohydrates while you’re doing your long runs, the body will start to burn muscle for fuel and you don’t want that.
4. What you eat the night before a race is not as important as what you eat in the few weeks leading up to it. Don’t get me wrong, your nutrient intake the night before a race is still important, but if you just ate junk food or did not eat enough complex carbohydrates in the few weeks leading up to it, the one good meal the night before a race will not enhance your performance significantly.
5. Get enough sleep the night before the race. This is a very obvious but important one. How do you think you will feel about running 42.2km (26.2 miles) in the morning of the race when you only had 4-5 hours of sleep? Try to get 8 hours of quality sleep. You should be well-rested and energized if you want to truly enjoy your first 42.2.
6. Don’t drink alcohol the night before. Apart from being hung over and feeling sick in the morning, alcohol is a diuretic, which means that you can get dehydrated. Dehydration before and during the race is one of the long-distance runners’ worst nightmares. The body loses fluids and performance is hindered. Not fun. Save the drinking for after the race if that’s how you choose to celebrate your accomplishment.
7. Try not to eat any new foods or new supplements in the week before the race. If you don’t know how your body will react to a particular food or supplement, it’s best not to consume it before the race. Why take the chance? Trying out new foods or supplements should be done during your training sessions that you do more than a week prior to the race.
8. Pace yourself properly. So many runners get super excited on their first marathon. Therefore, they start out way too fast only to find that a few kilometers after the halfway point they feel like they have bricks tied to their legs and no energy left to maintain a good pace. It’s best to start out a few seconds per km slower than you would like your pace to be and gradually speed up as you get farther into the race.
9. Consume carbs/electrolytes during the race. Your body loses a lot of electrolytes during the long race in addition to depleting your body’s carbohydrate supply. For example, a good drink mix that can help you replenish your carbs and electrolytes is Cytomax (I used it and it worked for me). Please note that before using any new drink mixes in races, try them in training, refer back to tip #7.
10. Once you’ve started the race, don’t think about how far you still have to go. Instead, think about how far you’ve come. Think of all the hard work and training that you have done to prepare yourself for the race and how great it is to be able to do this. Regardless if you have 2 miles left to go or 22, maintain a positive attitude and be proud of yourself for doing this. Focus on proper breathing, form and pace.
I hope that you found my top 10 tips for first-time marathoners helpful.
What would you add to the list? Have you done a marathon?
And remember: “A marathoner is a marathoner regardless of time. Virtually everyone who tries the marathon has put in training over months, and it is that exercise and that commitment, physical and mental, that gives meaning to the medal, not just the day’s effort, be it fast or slow. It’s all in conquering the challenge.”-Mary R. Wittenberg, president, New York Road Runners Club
Happy Fitness 🙂
Yana