In this episode of the podcast, we discuss how to train for endurance. Naturally, this is a very broad category of training, encompassing many different sports (such as marathon running), and we obviously can’t cover every single nuance. However, by the end of the podcast, you should have a pretty solid idea of what to focus on and a much better understanding of how to train for endurance.
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Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated, so please excuse any errors or deviations from the source.
Gary
Hello and welcome to the Triage Method podcast with me, Gary McGowan and my co-host as always, Mr. Patrick Farrell. Paddy, how are you?
Paddy
I’m positively splendid, Gary. As per usual, How are you?
Gary
I’m very good, thank you.
Paddy
Great. What are we talking about today?
Gary
Today we’re talking about endurance training and specifically with focus on building up to a marathon or just training for the marathon. You might have done one before. This is part of the How to Train series. We’re progressing through different training goals and particularly those that we help our clients with a treat. So we have a lot of people that run their first marathon or want to improve their endurance running generally, and we coach them to achieve that goal, while obviously continuing to preserve their health, their body composition and their performance. Obviously in this domain, but in all the domains as well, and ideally not being injured along the way. So that’s the goal. We want to do it in a healthy manner where we’re not getting injured. We want to be able to well, some people want to be able to continue training in the gym and maybe preserve their muscle mass. Obviously, if you’re a professional marathon runner, that’s not necessarily your primary goal, but it is for a lot of our audience. And what we’ll do with this podcast really is focus on the person that’s trying to maybe run their first marathon or maybe just get the basics in order. There are absolutely further technical points you could go into. And if you’re if you’re an advanced endurance runner, but that’s a very, very small percentage of our audience. So most of you we want to be working towards maybe your first marathon or you did one before, but you didn’t train for a properly. You want to get a proper plan of action in place. And even if you are a bit more advanced, there are still things you can learn here because one of the courses are some of the most common mistakes that we see with endurance running training, such as just going out, running as far as you can, as fast as you can, and not having a plan that’s very unwise. So that’s the topic of today.
Paddy
Yeah, I would say like today’s, you know, the goal of today’s episode is to basically show you how to go from zero to good at endurance stuff, you know, but going from that kind of good to great or great to, you know, unbelievable. That obviously requires a lot more specifics, you know, And it’s the same with all the stuff we’ve been talking about, really, in terms of, Yeah, okay, here you have the broad stroke, broad strokes of the program, the broad strokes of what needs to be covered pool. That’s going to get you to good enough. That’s going to get you to. Okay, I can I can be fairly decently with this knowledge, but and I think people kind of fail to recognize that there is a difference between, okay, I’ve I’ve you know, I’ve done good enough. I’ve done decently well from that level to okay, now I’m actually in like the pro ranks, you know, like there is a relatively large gap in that and sometimes it’s just a case of you just need to keep doing more of what has been working or what we’ve been discussing. Sometimes in the case of you just needs to do it for longer. But often there are very subtle changes that you have to make and unfortunately we can’t give you the broad strokes of that because it’s generally person specific situation, specific sport specific, etc.. You know, So I just wanted to throw in that caveat there.
Gary
Absolutely. And where we start with this really, guys, is are some of my rules of thumb. And there’ll be a lot of rules of thumb in this podcast because again, you just you can’t there’s there’s not going to be evidence like very specific evidence on every one of these things, you know, So when you’re running your first marathon, it’s not like we have a complete evidence base and loads of guidelines that show this is the exact best way to do it, because people come from all sorts of backgrounds. So what I use are heuristics and rules of thumb that I think are quite helpful. I’m one of those that I always say to clients. As for any new running distance, the goal should be to earn that distance. Okay, so earn your ten k, earn your half marathon, earn your marathon. And what I mean by that is that you should put a bit of effort into, you know, training for a5k excuse me, going out and performing a5k, whether it be at an event or just on your own, your testing yourself. Put a bit of time into that for going to the ten K before going to the half before going to the full marathon. The reason this is so beneficial is that, one, it gets you into the habit of, you know, basically training for running very regularly without having this massive gap of I’m going from zero to marathon or I’m going for five Kate Marathon, because if we were to talk about that in a weight loss context, it’s like saying I have 40 kilos to lose. Surely we break that down and say let’s aim for five kilos in the next 12 weeks or something like that, rather than just saying, okay, we’ve got 40 kilos to lose, let’s get stuck in. Okay, we want to break it down a bit. But not only that, we also want to do is begin to focus on some of the details that will carry over to your marathon. So for example, you need to get good pacing, right? You need to get an idea of what your five K pace look like. Once you know what your five K pace looks like, you’ll begin to realize that, okay, if I’m going to train for a marathon, I need to start running slower because I can only run five K at this pace. I need to be slower if I want to run for longer. So that’s where you begin to calibrate your training a bit more. So you get an idea of Here’s my five K pace, here’s my ten K based. If I go to 20 care plus, I start to slow down to this pace and so on. And this all becomes really important as you move into the training planning shortly. Okay, So don’t just go into endurance running and think I’m going to just run as far as I can without any previous training. And this is my only 12 weeks. Okay? Some people do it, they do the couch two marathon, but it’s it’s just not ideal. Okay. I think getting used to the practice of running, getting used to things like how you manage your breathing, your the posture that you hold, you know, the cadence, the right stride length for you. All of that stuff comes with time. And if you can begin to focus on it over smaller distances first, it’s much easier to then focus on it over a very large difference, like a marathon. Again, if we take it to another similar situation, such as weight training, you know, we’re going to get our our new clients to focus on staying a little bit further from failure at the start. They’re going to start with lighter weights. They’re going to start with, you know, not aiming for that one rep, Max, every week, but eventually we get to to that one rep. Max But in the interim we might focus on, okay, what’s your eight rep Max What’s your 5 rep Max What’s your 5 rep set with two reps reserved and so on. And this is the same thing that we’re trying to develop here as it applies to marathon running. We want to prioritize our bench press technique. We also want to prioritize a running technique. Okay, So it’s not just about going in testing maximally, especially not for something that is as tough on the body as a marathon.
Paddy
Yeah, and obviously it runs on your entire situation. Like if you’re coming to this now, coming out of a start up, I want to run a marathon and you’re coming to this from a background of doing lots of field sports or doing a lot of sport in general when you were younger. Like it’s obviously going to be a different experience than if you’re coming into this going. I’ve literally never done any exercise and I just I’ve always wanted to do a marathon, so let’s let’s crack on with it, you know? So there are differences in terms of how you approaches that You might come in like I was saying, okay, we’re going to own that five K first. You come in the first day and you’re like, focus easy. It’s no no water. You know, obviously you can kind of, you know, take it at your own pace, Skip ahead if you’re like, okay, case, you know, pretty easy. I still understand. I need to, you know, redevelop if you’re coming to this after a long time offer, whatever the like skill of pacing and learning how hard I should be pushing, etc..
So there are still benefits to, you know, spending some time like try to get mastery effectively and but you can kind of push ahead at your own pace. But you have to actually be honest with yourself with this stuff because I couldn’t tell you the amount of people that have come to us either having gone, Oh, yeah, I want to run a marathon or I want to do X, Y, Z run, and they’ve gone from zero to I’m going to try to be a hero, like straight at the gate.
And it just doesn’t work. Like you might be lucky and you might just go, okay, that was just very hard in the body and you know, and I’m not going to do that again or which unfortunately happens very often. You do that first, run it, and then you end up with an injury in your ankle or your knee or something because you just pushed yourself to the max to try to get your max speed, max distance, everything straight at the gate, having not trained for a while and it’s just a recipe for injury, even if it’s only a minor injury, usually most people would pick up some sort of little niggle from that.
You know?
Gary
Absolutely. And that’s really important. And that brings us to also understanding what are the barriers to performance, because this informs training. Okay. So at a physiological level, there’s sort of three different things that we can think of as barriers and those things that we’re trying to improve. The first one being maximal oxygen uptake or VO2 max. Okay, you’ve probably heard of this before, but it’s basically our kind of overall quantification of one’s aerobic fitness.
It’s describing our ability to pump blood around the body, to oxygenated blood, to take that oxygen to the tissues and then to get that oxygen from the blood into the tissues and use it appropriately. Okay. So it’s a very it’s a very brief summary of something that encompasses a lot of different systems, including the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system, the blood vessels and vascular system itself, and then the muscle and of course.
Okay. And all of that then is involved with the broader, most broader musculoskeletal system, the bones, ligaments, etc.. Okay. But the first thing we need to do is we need to get oxygen to tissues so that we can keep running for a long period of time. Additionally, alongside that, we’ve got something that’s called our lactate or anaerobic threshold.
There’s multiple different ways of defining these thresholds and you’ll see events like ventilatory threshold is lactate threshold, you’ll see an air and IT rollback threshold. There are some subtle differences in the definitions, but the key thing here to understand is that there’s a certain point at which you can continue to use your aerobic system for a long period of time if you don’t go any faster.
Okay. So this is generally when you’re in that range of zone to so you’re about 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. Let’s take someone who has a 200 beats P beats per minute max heart rate. That would be 120 to 140 beats per minute there. We’re very likely to be below the lactate threshold. Okay. This is the threshold at which you’re going to begin to produce more lactate.
Your lactate levels are going to be increasing as a result of you digging into an aerobic energy production. As you dig into any Arabic energy production, what ends up happening is you get more metabolites produced, more metabolic byproducts, you get more fatigue within the muscle, more acidosis, and these things begin to compromise muscle function. And they also feed back to the cardiorespiratory system, increasing your heart rate, increasing your breathing rate.
And it’s going to make it very difficult to sustain that for a long period of time. So if your threshold is increasing, that’s a good thing because it means you can stay in the aerobics zone. You’ll have a broader zone too, and that’s something that will sustain you then for a longer period of time. Okay. So with that said, if you’re an endurance runner, you will be digging into those anaerobic systems that are absolutely necessary.
It’s really important. It’s not like if you look at a marathon runner, they’re not in zone two, okay? People talk about Zone two all the time, but that’s that’s not really where you are, where you actually performing, but it’s just having that broader aerobic capacity that gives you a little bit more time to play with the aerobic systems before digging, digging into any roll back energy production where you have more fatigue and obviously not as much duration in the tank.
Okay. So that’s something that’s another physiological barrier to performance. So, so far, we’ve covered the broader aerobic capacity, how well we’re able to get that oxygen to tissues, VO2 max. And then we’ve got where our lactate or any threshold is. And then if that’s higher, it means that we’ve got a broader aerobic capacity. The two fit together very well.
And then the final component, which is very much related to the two, is the concept of energetics or energy supply. Okay? At the very basic level, we simply need food. Okay? If you don’t have any carbohydrates on board and you’ve got super, super low body fat, then you’re going to find it very difficult to perform. That’s clearly going to be a barrier to performance.
But it’s not just about fuel availability either. It’s also how well you’re using your energy. So this comes in this brings us to something called running economy. Okay. So if you’ve, like, really like sloppy running technique, you know, let’s say you’re you’re really jumping like side to side and your legs are flailing all over the place and your torso is really slack.
If you’re doing that, you’re going to be wasting a lot of energy. Okay? So that’s going to compromise your performance because you’re just not being efficient. Other things might be the terrain that you’re on. You know, is it really sloppy ground? It’s uneven ground. What altitude are you at? What’s what’s the temperature outside? All these different factors. And there are many contribute to running economy and therefore contribute to how efficiently you’re using the energy energy that you have available.
So when I think about this there the key the three key areas I think of as physiological barriers to performance, we’ve got VO2 max lactic threshold and then energetics. Of course there are more. For example, you might think of an injury that you have as your barrier to performance. There are very clear psychological barriers to performance. That’s really important with endurance running.
But these are the three kind of core areas I think that we focus on when we’re actually planning training.
Paddy
And the way I always describe it is like you basically have a hybrid car. You know, you have one one system works on electricity, one system you have the backup of like petrol, right? So that’s just a you know, you can modify your car multiple different ways depending on whatever. Right. And so you have like some sort of this is not technically possible, but let’s say you have some sort of like solar or battery or solar device on the roof where, you know, sunny, you can get some energy coming in.
So you basically want to stay in that kind of electrical system for as long as possible. Right. So if you go too fast, right. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to switch over into the petrol. Right. It was really expensive. You don’t want to do that, right? You also only have a small tank of gas. You know, it’s it’s much smaller than your battery capacity.
Now, again, this is an analogy. Don’t take it to the bank. Right. So you want to stay in that electric for as long as possible. Right. So, you know, there’s is a certain point, right, where you go, okay, electricity, electricity, electricity. It’s all good. Okay. Now I’m going to fast. I switch over to petrol. Right. And that’s kind of where we’re at that like lactate threshold, that point of no return where we’re starting to go into more petrol.
Right. In terms of humans, where we’re starting to use a lot more glycogen and it build up all these like metabolic byproducts, etc., right? So that’s generally how I describe it and usually make it more specific to the actual individual in terms of, well, when you’re going this fast, this is when we’re starting to kick into more petrol.
Right. But I find it helps to really think about that in terms of, okay, well I have two systems here. There are actually other systems in the body, but again, just bear with me, right? And you’ve two systems. We basically just want to make sure that the point of no return, that switch over point, we want to push that higher and higher, right?
We want to push that to a point where, okay, let’s just say the car can go whatever, 100 miles an hour. Right. And at 70 miles an hour, that’s the point where it starts kicking over into petrol. Right. But let’s say again, we can modify this car. We can go through training, we can get to a point where that is now 75 miles per hour.
That’s the point of no return. Okay. We can continue to train. We can continue modifying the car. Okay. Now it’s 80, right? And that’s effectively what we want to do. We want to build up that capacity so that lactate threshold is much higher right now in terms of actual running and in terms of actual like human physiology, we are talking about oxygen consumption, oxygen uptake, oxygen getting around the body that basically the energy, it’s not actually energy when you need oxygen to burn the energy.
Right. And or utilize the energy and using fast as fuel, which is what you’re going to predominantly be using when you’re training in an anaerobic way and you need a lot of oxygen. Right. And again, people would like to break this down in terms of, oh, like how is it going to be your lung capacity? Is it going to be like your capillary density is going to be your overall like vascular system, etc., etc.?
Like ultimately, yeah, that’s cool for like physiologists to debate. But you as a trainee, it doesn’t matter, right? What you actually really care about is the outcome. Right. And even though we’re saying like VO2 max is the kind of outcome that we’re using here, it’s actually not predictive, right? If you can have a relatively poor VO2 max and still do incredibly well in your sport, still do incredibly well in running marathon running endurance events.
So it’s not predictive. However, it is something that we can, you know, relatively easily keep an eye on. Like it’s not perfectly accurate, but stuff like, you know, like an Apple Watch or whatever, I think that tracks your VO2 max based on like, you know, walking speed. So and heart rate. So like you can get a picture of not perfect by any means, but at least you can have a picture of it.
So once we have something that we can kind of track, you know, Happy days, we have other metrics in terms of, okay, you’re going for a run. Like once you know what the intensity should feel like, you know, like they often say, you know, if we’re staying in this aerobic system, yeah, you should be at a pace where you can have a conversation, but the other person would know that you are exercising, you know, like you’re not like, like completely out of breath.
But, you know, they know that you’re doing something. They know that you’re you’re putting in some work. If you’re on the telephone, it’s going to be like, are you exercising at the moment? Like they’re going to know, Right? So we can use that kind of just like, you know, daily, you know, very easy. Oh, it sounds like you’re exercising to kind of get a picture of where that, you know, aerobic system is being used versus you’re gasping for air, you know, then, okay, we’re starting to kick into more of those anaerobic thresholds or anaerobic systems.
Right. And so that can be really helpful because if you know that, then you also have a very easy way to see if you are progressing because you’re going, okay, well, whatever my paces, we all kind of paces because, you know, it’s very specific to people. But like if you’re running at a specific pace and you’re like, okay, well, this actually used to be the point where I was gasping for air, like, you know, But when you can assume that your aerobic system, you’re doing better, like you’re fitter, right? So that’s a long, roundabout way of saying that, yeah, all of this stuff matters, but also it doesn’t necessarily matter. Like you don’t need to know all the ins and outs of all of this to improve your running. You know, you can use just how you feel.
Gary
It’s actually 100%. Yeah, that’s super important then like I actually, I come back to that a lot with clients like sometimes like when I talk about like heart rate zones, I’m, and I’m talking about zone based training for my clients. I’m putting it in there like as I was a rough guiding light. Sometimes my clients referred to stress as one of the local Gary. Like my heart rate went up to 155 162. Theyre like I really need to slow this down and I’m just like, okay, how were you feeling? They were like, No, I was fine. I could have continued for ages. I actually felt really good as it was. No problem. Okay, then we don’t need to worry about this. This is just not an issue.
Okay? So when you when you when you’re planning running and you’re thinking about heart rate, you have to think about it at the level of the individual. People have different heart rate responses for many different reasons. There can be individual factors on a given day, but had loads of caffeine or sleep, high stress, etc. But ask yourself how does this correlate with my actual RPE?
Rating of perceived exertion. If you’ve got an elevated heart rate on a given day and you’ve got an elevation or B you just feel like crap, you feel your heart’s racing in your chest, that’s useful concordant information if you got the elevation heart rate, but you feel fantastic and you feel run for three more hours, then you don’t need to act on the fact that your heart rate has changed.
Okay, So just keep that in mind, especially as we get back to some of the specifics around running planning. Now, I’m going to go back to a couple of my rules of thumb here. This is not like super evidence based, but it’s just like when I’m approaching a new client, I’m looking out for these things. Okay. So ideally as a prerequisite for somebody that’s training for a marathon, a 12 to 18 weeks before the marathon, I’d like to see that they’ve completed a run in the range of 15 to 20.
Okay. Okay. So you’ve done that before. It might be like, for example, I might say to them, have you done long running before? And they might say, Oh yeah, sure. I trained for half marathons for years. I’ve just been out for a year or two. In that case, I’m like, okay, that’s fine. You know, I know that you’ve done this in the past.
I know you’ve got some of those adaptations so that if we pull away at this for a few weeks, these are going to come flying back. Okay? Similarly, if someone tells me I just ran a half marathon last week, there’s a full marathon in four months, I’d like to train for it. I’m happy with that. I’m going to say, Yeah, that’s no problem.
That sounds like a decent prerequisite. We can make this happen. If someone comes 12 weeks out, they say Never run before, Gary, but I want to do a marathon. I’m thinking, Yeah, we can do it, but this isn’t ideal. Okay, So the ideal prerequisite is you’ve done the 15 to 20 distance, ideally more than 12 to 18 weeks for the marathon because that gives you plenty of time to focus on what’s my goal?
Time for the marathon, how am I going to approach my pacing, etc. The problem is, if you’ve never done any long running, you don’t even know where your pacing should be. For something like the marathon distance. So we’re spending a lot of our time then trying to focus on that, trying to calibrate that train, ask ourselves should we be aiming for 6 minutes per kilometer?
How about 530? You’re doing really well over a5k distance, but we’ve no idea what it looks like over the half marathon and then full marathon distance. So you’ve basically just got a lot of the basics taken care of. If you’ve done that those longer distances before, again, it’d be like trying to go into a powerlifting competition. If you say Go, I’ve got a powerlifting competition 12 weeks.
And I say, Yeah, right, send me a picture of your bench press. And you say, Oh, well, I’ve actually never bench press before. Now I’m thinking, okay, now not only do we have to focus on strength development now we have to focus on getting your basic bench press technique. Don’t you don’t even know the rules of the sport.
Okay, So you want that stuff taken care of. And then the specifics of the training are far more impactful.
Paddy
Yeah, I’m like, You might be listening. She’s like, I’m not like training for half a year for a marathon, right? I’m like, That’s fair enough. You might just think, okay, I’m going to be able to I’m going to do a 12 week prep, 16 week prep for this marathon. And again, it can be done right. But I actually think one of the biggest issues with doing that is, you know, it’s skill acquisition, a lot of it, but running while like running well like well enough is actually relatively easy.
Like humans are kind of designed to do it right. So you can get to a point where you’re actually you’re pretty, pretty, pretty decent at this, right? Like I say, you probably learn to run quicker than you could learn like a bench press or something, right. Like to Brett Bench Press. Well, right. But but I actually think the biggest issue is we’re going to have to build volume over that 12, 18 weeks, whatever it is that we have before that, which means that our overall volume is going to be relatively high towards the end of that marathon prep.
Right. And while that will allow you because we’ll do some sort of like delivering, we’ll do some sort of like peaking, tapering, whatever you want to call us. And before the actual race, well, that will allow you to complete the marathon. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll lead to your best performance. Right. Because generally, if I can get a couple of weeks of really high output closer to the start, closer to the start of this prep where I’m like, okay, I know you can hit these distances.
We’re not even thinking about that in our mind. We’re not even thinking about, well, can I even hit the required distance that removes so much stress from the overall training process? Whereas if you’re coming in to, you know, whatever week 12 of a 16 week marathon prep and you’ve never even come close, like you’re only just starting to come close to feeling like, okay, I think I can even hit the bare minimum distance.
I can actually just complete the race like it’s not even a physiological stress. Like obviously the physiological stress in terms of, you know, you actually have to do the race or do you actually have to do the distance, you actually have to recover from that, etc.. But there’s so much extra stress where you’re constantly thinking, I’m not going to be able to do this like I did that like 25 kilometers two weeks ago.
And I that was rough. You know, like there’s just this voice in the back of your head, right? And obviously, again, across the whole training block, there’s more fatigue being built up. So while you are adapting and you are probably able to run a little bit faster, probably able to run a little bit more efficiently, etcetera, like you’re still feeling it.
It’s still hard training, You’re still feeling like there’s a recovery. Dash effectively, right? And that’s probably for me, that’s the biggest thing. You know, it’s the psychology of it. You know, it’s always like just in the back of your head, you just constantly thinking, Am I able to even hit the distance, you know, And that’s not that’s, that’s assuming like we’re not dealing with only little niggles, injuries, fucking whatever else, you know.
So for me, I would like most people to have a decent space, you know, again, it doesn’t have to be, oh, I’ve run a marathon before, obviously that would be, you know, probably ideal. But I would like to see that you’ve got into a higher volume like you’ve at least on a run over 2 hours that would be, you know, phenomenal.
You know, you’re like, okay, cool. I know you can at least run for 2 hours, right? And like, I have a few clients at the moment, but they come from a background of having a large Arabic base. They might not have been specific to running, but I know for them that, okay, you can we don’t necessarily need to have hit two, three or 4 hours of running right now to know that, you know, you’re going to be able to run that distance or for that long and a couple of weeks, because I know you have a good aerobic base.
I know you know how to pace yourself in terms of, you know, what that feels like intensity was, you know, But how do we get on with that? Let’s say you accomplished all those prerequisites or you don’t. What’s the what’s the what’s the approach here? You’re like, for 218 weeks now. Let’s go.
Gary
Yeah, you’ve all done your pre your pre prep, you’re ready to go. I look what I saw. Firstly for those who aren’t, you know in the running world and you’ve come in from a lifting background because they know a lot of people try to make that transition. There’s just as much like my way is the best way. Your way is crap in running as there is in lifting.
So you hear people arguing in lifting about is it like that? Should I go high intensity, Should they go high volume 31 statutory or five sets? I should have got a failure, should I not. It’s the same in running. Okay. You even have this at the level of like the Journal of of Physiology where there’s an entire kind of debate series dedicated to it, like doing more interval running versus doing longer running or longer endurance work and so on.
Okay. So the point is that there’s conflict in every field and there are better ways for certain people. Some runners love doing more like high intensity interval runs as in lots of like repeated sprints, shorter, faster runs, etc. Others like to do super high volumes of the low intensity work. What I tried to do is take a bit from each area because that’s what’s most likely to apply to the broadest range of individuals.
So I call it like there’s just a three pronged approach where we have firstly, so I break it down and then I’ll elaborate a little bit.
Paddy
Just before you do that. Right. Like when you look at all of these things, that one commonality is they’re all building a big aerobic base. Like I don’t think like all the nuances, all the little specifics, whatever. Like, I actually don’t think it matters because they’re all actually doing the exact same thing, right? They’re going about it in a different way.
But even I know you’re going to talk about it in a second, so sorry for interrupting you, but like, even if you’re doing like intervals the way you like runners, marathon runners at least do intervals, like they basically become aerobic intervals, right? Like they’re not they’re not doing the same type of intervals that a sprinter would be doing, like a sprinter are going to do 30 seconds, you know, seven or eight out of ten intensity run and then I’m going to basically get like complete recovery, right?
Like marathon runners don’t do that. They’re like, Oh, I’m going to do a seven or eight out of ten intensity run, and then I’m going to take a minute Recovery. So every subsequent like Sprint after that just becomes more and more aerobic, you know? So again, don’t lose the bars for the trees. They’re all they’re all building the huge aerobic base, right?
So they’re all arguing at the same point. Everyone knows that the marathon is however many hours or whatever you know, it’s like we’re all aiming at the same point. So, you know, Gary’s going through this now. Just keep that in mind.
Gary
Yeah. And that is that is really important. Okay. So what I have is this three, three pronged approach that I’ll use with most people. I might emphasize one problem more with some to with others. And a lot of the time we have three at least some point in the marathon prep. So what I would what I consider to be like the cornerstone and this should probably make up the largest percentage of your training, especially from a time in a volume perspective are the slow runs.
Okay, so these are slow runs that you do below your goal pace for the marathon. That’s really important where your your goal is to accumulate distance building towards about 80% of the marathon distance. So what that looks like is about, you know, targeting to to 30 4k or 32 to 35 K, if you’re getting in that distance before you get to the marathon, I’m more than happy you’re going to finish it.
To be honest. If you get 25 to 30. Caven I know you’ll finish the marathon, you’ll get there, but ideally 32 to 35 K you’ve done before. So the ad that time of the feet, you’re well used to it, especially because this is below gold pace when you equate it out because you’re running slower and you do end up running roughly around the period of time that you will on the day of the marathon.
And as a result, I know that you’re prepared for the time of the fit. So this should make up most of your training time. The slower runs these are going to be in that range roughly of zone to where your 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. And the thing that strikes most runners are most people that are getting into running is that this feels so slow, okay?
People really have to slow themselves down. And that can be difficult because you’re all motivated to do your running. But trust me, when you’re ten, 15, 20 K and that run and you’ve been running for two plus hours, that starts to get pretty difficult and you’ll be glad that you took your time at the beginning. Okay, so that’s the largest portion of your training.
Your second problem then as you go on the muscle.
Paddy
Right, when if you’re a beginner, amateur, this, this, this is your first. Yeah. Like this is the one that, you know, if you like. I very often do this with clients who are coming in that are like, I’ve never done a marathon. I just, I want to you improve this off. This is the thing that we’re hammering the most.
This is the thing that makes it the bulk of our training. And it’s actually I try to get people to a stage and again, you touched on it there where they feel like they could just go all day, right? They’re at a pace they’re running and they’re like, I’m not I’m never reaching that point where I feel destroyed.
I’ve never reached that point where I’m absolutely gasping for air. I’m like you said, people generally will find they’re like, I feel like I’m running very slowly. You know, I feel like I’m not I, I could push myself a lot harder. And I say to them, I’m like, look, that’s cool. We’re it saved our energy for the actual race, right?
Right now, we’re trying to improve your running economy, improve your efficiency, improve your, like just aerobic capacity overall. Right. And we’re just building all of those things. The length of time that you’re doing this, the like pace that you’re going up, you know, all of these things, we’re just doing it. We’re taking it handy, right? We’re spending a lot of time in this.
Like, I actually don’t really like the zones. I feel like they’re very convoluted and people would say zone to when they’re actually in zone three and it’s all it’s whatever. But we’re in this classic zone to like whenever 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. Right. Obviously, again, it’s going to be different for everyone. But that’s a whole other discussion.
Right. But if you just hammered that aerobic system right and you did it via running, you’re going to build basically all the adaptations that you actually need to complete the race. Right. And that has be the first goal, right, that you want You don’t want to do 80 weeks of prep or however long it is for a marathon and then not even completed, Right?
So that has to be the first like tick the box, right? And if you did nothing else except this like the aerobic base stuff, if you did not like it just seems like two, three times per week. Like you would get to a stage where you’ve a pretty good gas tank and you can complete the race right now afterwards and get out touch on this.
Now if you want to do it in good time, you want to really improve the speed at which you’re running. We’re going to need to bring in some other things. That’s not to say that they are actually 100% necessary because there are many runners out there who do stuff like that, like a mass method like that, and acetone, aerobic fitness and whatever for max aerobics, fitness training, where they’ll basically just try to get to that peak.
When we talk about that like energy system transition, they’re like they’re basically at the peak of the aerobic system. Just stay at that, you know. And what they’re doing then is really working on trying to get faster while staying at that level, Right. So you could do that. You could never touch on any of the things like I is going to talk about now in a second and still really, really improve your overall running right?
So again, there are discussions, there’s so many debates, but just keep in mind, what are you actually trying to do?
Gary
Check And then the second problem is sort of the the middle one. So moderate distance or moderate moderate ones, I should say. So these are runs that are generally going to be in the 6 to 12 range. You might say 5 to 15 K range is not too important. But the idea here is that it’s a moderate enough distance marathon.
It’s not it’s it’s not like super short for like the intervals somewhere in the middle. Okay. These are runs that you’re going to perform at. And this varies a lot, but I’m going to say 0 to 15% faster than your goal race pace Because the distance is shorter, you can run a little bit faster. So we’re getting exposure to faster pacing so that when you do that slower pacing, it’s it’s just it’s just far easier.
You build up to the pace. You’ve worked in those anaerobic zones a little bit. It kind of prepares you a little bit as well for later in the race. Okay. When you are struggling because you’ll be emulating that a little bit here. So moderate runs 6 to 12 K range, roughly 0 to 50% faster than your goal. Race pace.
And then that’s going to put you somewhere in the range of zone three, which is 70 to 80% of your max heart rate. I find that when people talk about zone two, they’re mostly talking about zone three, really, you know, 70 to 80% is 140 to 160 beats per minute at a 200 beats per minute max heart rate.
And that’s, I think, where most people probably do their cardio and and that’s fine. You know, there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re still probably a little bit sub lactate threshold are getting towards that as you go to the 160 to 170 for someone that’s that’s trained for sure. But you should be a little bit fast in your goal race pace and what that would look like would be, for example, if you’re running at a five minute per kilometer pace, that’s five by 60 seconds, 300 seconds, 10% faster would be, you know, 270 seconds.
So you’re going five are four and a half minutes per kilometer now, roughly speaking, versus the 5 minutes per kilometer. Okay. So that’s how you begin to approach it. The percentages aren’t too important. The thing I just like to remind people is when I say run a little bit faster, I don’t mean like a minute or 2 minutes per kilometer faster.
Okay. That’s a huge difference. 15 to 30 seconds becomes very significant over 1020 K Okay, even over 5 to 10 get ready. So that’s, that’s kind of where you start with the second problem. Anything to add there?
Paddy
Yeah, practically speaking, the way I often do it is I put in little milestones like we’re gonna go, okay, this, this week we’re going to do like a5k and we’re not going to try hit. You’re like best ask phenomenal five K, but I want you to feel like that’s like K was a fast five k. You know, if we are using pacing for a beginner, we might not use pace as a strategy or whatever, but if we’re using that, we’re kind of set a rough pace of timing.
But practically again, you’ll use something like a5k or seven K or even at any rate, potentially where you’re like, okay, I want you to run this. I want you to run it fairly fast. I want you to feel like, okay, I’m pushing myself, but I want you to be at that pace where it’s just a book like we discussed earlier on, where, you know, you want to be on the phone theater person to know that you’re exercising.
I want you to be just pushing into that pace where the person on the other side of the phone is like, yeah, I should we organize this call later? Because like, you’re clearly, like, pushing hard, right? Like, you’re not like, absolutely destroyed, but you’re definitely, you know, asking for a little bit of air, right? So it’s just that little bit faster.
Again, it doesn’t have to be, you know, incredibly soul destroying. Your body is absolutely destroyed, wrecked after the run. But I want you to see improvements over time. So if we use that kind of like let’s just say five K or 510 somewhere in that range, right. I want you to see that. Okay. Actually, look, all the work that we’ve been doing, even though we haven’t been really focusing on my speed, my speed has been improving these this five k my time for that, even though I’m only asked, you know, let’s say 80% of my max heart rate previously when I was doing it I like red lining destroying myself like I can see that
I’m actually doing this faster. Right? So you want to hit those little milestones along the way, Right? And even if it is something that we’re only doing like every week or every second week, like once a week, you know, once every two weeks that we’re really putting in this kind of at a faster pace, more moderate run because we’re spending the vast majority of our time on the anaerobic system, like in that kind of, again, quote unquote, zone to like, we want to see some improvements over time.
They’re not going to happen every week. They’re not going to happen every fucking month, you know, But we want to see that. Okay, my five K pace, I’m now hitting the same pace that I used to hit when I was destroying myself, gasping for air. And I felt good. I felt like I could do a little bit more.
I felt like I could, you know, push myself. And that’s also often what I say with the like, you know, you’re in a good spot with the aerobic face building, like that kind of strong one like I was going on with, like, you basically want to end that distance. You want to end that session feeling like, you know, I definitely feel like I could have done more.
I feel like I could have gone for a longer distance. I feel like I could have like push myself a little bit harder. And again, we want to keep that. We want to keep that energy. We want to keep that in our mind that there’s more in the tank because that builds your confidence so much. And as I said, I think a lot of this is just psychology.
I think a lot of this is just like, if we can build a confidence where you’re like, I know I can hit the distance, I know I can push myself, I know I can, you know, run in a good time like you’re pretty goal checked.
Gary
And that brings us to the final of the three prongs which is interval running. Okay. So this is where you’re definitely doing super maximal pacing. Now, generally you’re going to do intervals in the range of 400 to 1000 meters, and this is going to be 10 to 30% faster than your goal race pace. So the idea here is you’re getting into zone four and maybe even Zone five.
You’re working, you’re pushing hard here. This is absolutely anaerobic. It’s working on much higher power output and then you have longer recovery periods. So for example, if you’re running like hard 800 meter bouts, we might have like anywhere from 2 to 5 minute recovery periods. They’re probably more on the higher end so that you can then go repeat that effort.
An important thing here is that like doing anaerobic training, interval training like this improve moves your aerobic base as well. Okay, that’s really important because sometimes people think that if you’re there’s that there’s strict adaptations. Interval training leads to one set of adaptations and just low, low intensity aerobic training leads to another. And that’s just not true. Okay?
There’s huge crossover. It’s just that there are some specific differences. The Reason you wouldn’t want to be doing like 80% of your volume as interval runs is that you’re probably going to get injured and you’re going to be fatigued all of the time. Okay, So this is great for building, not conditioning of the legs. You know, it’s going to be lot more to strengthen the muscles as well, especially if you’re you haven’t done much weight training before.
This is resistance training. It’s going to build up tendon strength, is going to build up your plyometric ability where you’re constantly bounding forward on those Achilles tendon, patellar tendons, etc.. So this is something that is can be quite productive. So you’ll see a lot of long distance runners doing like one K repeats, for example, on a track. You could also do heel runs here as an option, especially if you’re going to be doing a marathon that involves hills.
This would be a good opportunity for that. So this is the third problem and this will make up the smallest chunk of your training, but it’s still an important chunk. I don’t use this with every client, especially because a lot of my clients are nursing injuries. That’s why they end up working with me. So I’m definitely biased towards having them do the longer slower stuff than the superintend stuff that’s going to flare up their injuries a bit quicker.
Okay, but it is still a really important problem.
Paddy
Yeah, I’m often do when we bring in intervals like first of all, like you said, like generally for the vast majority of people that I work with, I’ve like endurance based goals. It’s probably not hugely necessary. Like we might do some sort of, you know, touch on the, you know, this more like really deep anaerobic system. We might do it in something that’s not necessarily running.
We might do like they were doing two resistance training sessions per week. We might just do some intervals on a bike or something at the end of those sessions, just so we’re like touching on it probably already in a fatigued state from the resistance training. So, you know, we don’t necessarily need to push as hard, whatever, right? So I wouldn’t be doing it with absolutely everyone.
But what I often do when I do bring this in, I kind of caveat us saying this is technique work, right? We’re building the technique of running fast and then we want to carry that technique over to the action endurance work that we’re doing, right. Because very often people, you know, confuse the mark for the territory and they go, okay, now I’m doing the sprint work, so I’m in I’m in sprint mode.
And I’m like, Yeah, okay, cool. Like that. We’d actually want to go in with a good amount of like zeal, energy, whatever, but keep the goal of goal. We’re trying to improve your endurance, right? So you don’t necessarily need to run at your absolute max to do that, right? Like you want to push the pace for sure, but you want to push the pace in a productive way.
You want to push the pace in a way that’s actually going to translate into your improved endurance again in the marathon. Right? So if you’re doing this, don’t let your technique get sloppy. You see this all the time, like like my running efficiency when I’m like doing the more endurance stuff. I’ve really worked on it. I’m doing like really good things.
And then as soon as you get them to sprint, like they’re all over the place and obviously, again, that that tidies up over time. As you get more efficient, you’ve done you’ve been exposed to it more, but you can do that from the off you can go. I’m not going to push myself faster than my technique allows me.
If I start noticing that my technique gets sloppy, then I need to slow down. I and again, it’s just building on efficiency kind of is the same concept in the gym. Like if you go, well, I’m going to push, you know, for eight reps here. And by five your technique is, you know, falling apart. Right? It doesn’t matter that you got the eight reps like you’re taking good shit.
You’re not actually getting the adaptations that you think you’re getting. Right. And that’s the same with running, right? So you don’t want to just ingrain shitty technique, you know, and just keep hammering this like shitty running economy just because you’re trying to run as fast as possible. All right, So do keep that in mind.
Gary
Yep. And then, of course, you’re going to need to do this over time. So the street time prong approach, what you need to do is ideally accumulate over a period of 4 to 6 weeks where you’re building up gradually so that longer runs, getting a little bit longer, maybe you’re adding an extra interval. You do that for 4 to 6 weeks and then you take a slight step back, okay?
And then you evaluate. The problem is if you’re constantly ramping up every single week, you’re accumulating fatigue, maybe higher risk of injury. So I like to have weeks where we just pull back the distance a little bit. We might pull it back to 50, 70%, recover a bit more and then make our plan for the next four weeks.
So let’s say it was four weeks. You’re taking a small step up each week, then you plateau or drop back down a little bit, so you drop back down to a lower level and then you start to climb a higher point again. And that’s what I would do in the lead up to the marathon. So that’s very broadly the approach that you’re going to aim for.
How this looks on paper is going to vary by by client. What I would typically end up doing is one of the longer runs at the weekend when people have more time and then I might have them do one or two of the moderate one runs midweek when it’s easier to get them in. Or we might have two long runs per week, but one might just be the longer at the weekend and then our interval run might be, you know, one of their training evenings that they have.
They get to a track or they can get to an area where they have to have a clear run four intervals. Very much depends the client, the time they have available and whether or not they’re doing additional gym work as well. Some people will be playing field sports, some people will be put in the gym as well. And as a result, we don’t have like a clear run at just running.
So it does vary on paper. But there if you have those three prongs in place, you should do pretty well.
Paddy
And as we said, that first one that slow, steady stays you know you’re at that kind of is on to or whatever you want to call it like that’s your bread and butter. So don’t get it. Don’t get it twisted up like, oh, cool. Like they said, Oh, there’s three problems. I’m going to focus on the integral running because that’s what I like doing.
That’s perfectly fine if you like doing it and I’m not going to stop it, it’s probably not going to result in your best marathon times, you know? Am I right? There’s just one caveat that we we just wanted to hammer. I know we said a few times, but you don’t need to run at your max to improve your running.
Right. It probably actually holds you back. I would say that’s probably the biggest for the majority of people. That’s the thing that they’re doing wrong. That’s the thing that’s actually holding them back from getting the results that they want. They’re just constantly trying to run as hard as possible for as long as possible. Yeah, you see people going like, Oh, I’m training for my marathon and they’ll put up like, I don’t know what their route data or their Strava or whatever, you know, and you look at and you’re like, you’re at 180 beats per minute and you’re a 30 year old individual.
Like this is like 90% of your max or even more 90% of your max heart rate. And you’re just going out for your casual run like mid-week. You know, it’s like you’re you’re really pushing yourself. Like you might be able to survive this for 12 weeks in the lead up to, you know, the marathon that you’re training for.
But you probably training way too hard. You know, you’re probably cutting yourself, cutting yourself short in terms of the distance you can accumulate, the miles that you can put on your legs over whatever, 12, 16 weeks, whatever it is, you know, and so run a little bit slower, get to the stage where you just feel like I could go all day.
If you can train at that stage, you’re just like, I have unlimited energy, I have unlimited battery here. You know, that is so confidence building that gets you to a stage where you’re just like a marathon. Easy. I feel like I have unlimited energy. Cool. You know, And then you can start training in those higher intensities when you’re like, I know I can complete the race.
I know the distance. Not a problem. You know, if I just have to run a little bit slower, I can do it right. Whereas if you only ever train in not like balls to the wall all else, like it’s just going to be more difficult to find out that I can’t know.
Gary
I mean, I totally agree that that’s the thing I probably speak about the most. And every time I post Twitter and social media, it always clicks with people because they’re like, Oh yeah, this is my barrier. Like I’m always running too fast. I find it difficult to slow myself down and so on. So that’s definitely something that people should focus on and also just understanding that training is training in order to keep that in your mind.
I’m building fitness, not testing fitness. Exact same when you’re in the gym. We’re not testing one hour back because every week just on training and keep the goal The goal okay the injury topic which is the kind of core final point, is one that I cover again all the time with clients and is one of the bottlenecks to running performance.
You know, I mentioned previously those physiological barriers to performance, but injuries are the real bottleneck in both bodybuilding and powerlifting and in running because as soon as you get an injury and if you don’t look after you let it run out long term and it’s constantly hindering your training, now you’re worried about like, you know, the specifics of your technique and your volume and so on, but you’re never able to push yourself anywhere near failure because of this injury and you’re constantly held back because of this injury.
And that’s the same thing when it comes to running. Okay, don’t increase volume too quickly. Take your time with those steps as you increase your body needs time to adapt. It’s not going to adapt from 28 to 40 K week to week. It’s like weight training. We are on small nudges. Okay, an extra rep here, an extra 2.5 kilos there.
It’s the same at running, you know, an extra kilometer or two as you’re increasing if you’re if you’re trying to speed up, make small changes. So I’m going to try it reduced by pace by 10 seconds. I’m going to try reduce by pace by 15 seconds. These are the small little changes that you begin to make really do accumulate over time.
And if you do see injuries pop up. So you’re thinking, God, you know, after yesterday’s run, my Achilles is at me, but I’ve got a 20 here today. I’m going to do it. It’s not worth it. Okay? Because what what starts as a small niggle can suddenly become a full blown tendon apathy that you’re now dealing with for six months.
That’s very frustrating. And that will certainly stop. You’re running a marathon to try to deal with those things quickly. If you start to see a flare up of an injury, pull back a little bit, pull back the volume, pull back the intensity, maybe do a little bit of rehab work, maybe do a consult with the triaged rehab team and then you’ll be, well, your way to getting back on the path.
But preventing an injury is always the best approach rather than rehab. Okay. You don’t want to be coming to me and Luke saying, ruptured my Achilles. Can you help me with the rehab? That’s a that’s a year long process where you are going to be focusing on that rather than just the two or three weeks of Take it easy when it initially flared up.
Paddy
Yeah. And I think again, for most people, if you start out running, you’re going to pick up some little things like some little niggles. It’s just it’s just par for the course, right? You need to be smart with this. You need to go, okay, there’s a little thing here. It is a little like, you know, I can feel like the outside of my knee or something, right?
And you’re like, I’m not really sure. Think you’re almost always better off to just take it a little bit easier, reduce the volume, reduce the intensity for a week. You can still get out and do your runs. You can still be actually, you know, progressing. You can still be pushing forward with things, but you’re just taking it just a little bit easier and you’re being smart with things.
You’re not loading, you’re not going, okay, yeah, I had a really hard run. And after that, like my, you know, I feel something inside my knee. It’s just it just doesn’t it doesn’t feel right, right. That’s not the time to be like, well, actually, I’m looking at my next week training program here and, you know, this is a week where I’m really going to be pushing myself.
So I’ll just wrap it up. It’ll be fun. You know, or I’ll spray some, like, numbing agents on it and it’ll be fine because that’s what people do, right? And don’t do that. Just go, okay, this is not the time. This is not the week to push hard. This is not the week to, you know, really go for it with training.
I just dial things back. Right. And that can actually be one of the harder things to do because you’re probably already built up a lot of adaptations. You’re feeling like, actually, I can. I’m getting some good momentum. That’s when it always seems to happen. You get a little niggle when you’re like, I feel like I’m in a good rhythm with things I’ve got.
I started hitting new distances. I started hitting like, you know, times or speeds or paces or whatever that, you know, I didn’t think was possible. And then it’s like, well, actually my ankles get at me, you know, or my knees beat out me or even my lower back. Something happens, right? It seems to always be the case. And it is just a case of dropping back.
I mean, some of that fatigue dissipate, still getting some blood through the area, so getting some motion, etc.. Again, obviously depends on the issue. Like you just torn your hamstring or something like maybe I wouldn’t be going out for even a handy run and, you know, but just reduce your volume. It sounds so like patronizingly simple. You’re just like, Sure, it couldn’t be.
That wouldn’t be that easy. But very often it is just get ahead of it as soon as and then you can start going back to higher and higher training loads check.
Gary
And I think that’s everything really. Of course, there are so many caveats or so many advanced methods that we could talk about, but this is just the the catchall, okay, These are the core principles. These are the things that will take you to a better marathon time. Okay. It may not take you to keep jogging. So to our if you’re currently running to tan or something like that, but it will take you to your first marathon.
And if you’ve done one before and you haven’t had a plan, you certainly improved by following these things. These are principles that will carry you very far. It’s like weight training, you know that the principles that apply for the advanced guys are the exact same as as they are for the beginners. They just require some tweaking on the individual level.
So if you do need further help guys, we do have coaching spaces available. So if you’d like to work with one of our team with your running goals or with your hybrid training goals, we were lifting and running or doing another endurance sport. We can help you out with that. So information the description box below for coaching, very important note.
Oh yeah. I was going to know our nutrition start is already closed guys. So you’re done. You can’t buy that anymore. Have a look out towards the end of the year. Sorry if you missed out, but if.
So you can join the waitlist for the nutrition start later this year and then you can get stuck into the boss for the moment. Sorry. Keep following you on social media. We put out so much free content. Guys. Make sure you’re following on Instagram. On YouTube, especially we’re putting on super high quality content over on YouTube. And we also have our newsletter which goes out each week, The Judgment, the newsletter, subscribe below.
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Paddy
And I don’t hope everyone enjoyed this and we’ll see you in the next one.
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